Archive for the EU category
February 18th, 2008
It’ll be interesting to see how this resolves:
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.
Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.
The case was brought by a Swiss bank after “several hundred” documents were posted about its offshore activities.
Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.
Wikileaks, in case you’ve never heard of it, has been gaining profile as the place to put information that someone is trying to keep under cover:
The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents.
Here’s a mirror of the Wikileaks site. A bit popular, at the moment.
Update: here’s a list of all the various “cover names” for the Wikileaks site. Clearly, the court didn’t have the first idea of how these things work.
February 17th, 2008
Today, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. Maybe it’ll run as a back page story in American newspapers tomorrow. Or maybe it will find its way to the front soon, with talk of NATO security guarantees, Serbian demands, and Russian/American pressures. Doesn’t it all sound familiar? From Jasmina Tešanović, over at Boing Boing:
The Sirens :: 02.17.2008
It’s starting again: the language of war is the daily bread in Serbia. The sirens of nationalism are turned on again, as if nothing had changed in the eight years after Milosevic was toppled.
[ . . . ]
In Belgrade yesterday a thousand nationalists with Serbian flags marched downtown to the Slovenian embassy. Today, in front of the American embassy, potential riots were controlled by the police. In Kosovo province, two thousand policemen from EU mission will be deployed for 120 days until the situation “becomes stable.”
[ . . . ]
The president of the government with much harsher tones accused the US and EU of robbing Serbia of its territory, after destroying Serbia in 1999 with bombs. High ranked Orthodox priests also condemn the loss of their historical heritage. The members of the Serbian government tour Kosovo, encouraging Serbs to stay there. They could have done that eight years ago by coming to terms with the criminal ethnic cleansing.
Over and over again.
July 10th, 2007
I had a practical interest in the international currency exchanges at an early age. When I was 10, my allowance came in US dollars, but the all the places I wanted to spend it at only accepted Deutsche Marks. I had discovered that my one US dollar would get me much more in my hometown village of Eichenzell than it would get me at the US dollar store at the base exchange at Downs Barracks in Fulda. That was the start of an understanding that would lead me to the thrills of the black market rates of the East German Marks when we went to Berlin, the generous exchange rate with Venezuelan Bolivars in the late 90s, and the joys of cheap Euro-denominated vacations in 2001.
But everything comes at a price, no? I had an inkling this was coming, as my last trip back to England was pretty expensive. But I wasn’t entirely prepared for this:
The euro rose to an all-time high against the yen and traded near a record versus the dollar on prospects the European Central Bank will signal plans to raise its benchmark interest rate at least once more this year.
[ . . . ]
The pound was near a 26-year high against the dollar on speculation the Bank of England will raise rates today.
[The Euro] was at $1.3614 against the dollar from $1.3613 yesterday and an all-time high $1.3681 reached on April 27.
[ . . . ]
The pound traded at $2.0152 after touching $2.0207 yesterday, the most since June 1981.
If you’re an American reading this, and don’t know why this matters to you, let me help - it means that it looks like you’re living on a soon to be third world currency.
May 3rd, 2007
Despite my infrequent posting on the matter, the subject of Turkey’s possible place in the European Union has been a subject of much fascination for me. Putting aside my qualms about EU overexpansion, I think the dance between Turkey and the EU powers can yield lessons for the much bigger global dance that we’re all involved in (like it or not). This Slate column does a decent job of touching on some of those issues. Check it out.
March 9th, 2007
I’m always on the lookout for works that do a good job of explaining why Big Brother is a problem. A surveillance society doesn’t spring up overnight, but we’ve been moving by leaps and bounds, lately.
In the US and UK, the vast majority of the public seems to be utterly complacent about the ubiquitous gathering and storing of information about our private lives by people who have absolutely no accountability to them. I don’t think it’s necessarily because they don’t care, it’s because they don’t understand what it means. And it’s not always the easiest thing to distill in a few minutes. So I was happy to come across this video.
Updated to link the video. The wordpress visual editor strikes again . . .
January 12th, 2007
As mentioned yesterday, I capped off what turned out to be quite the year of travel earlier this week. This final trip was the result of wanting to join a close friend in his hometown to celebrate his recent wedding. His hometown? Karachi. Not exactly a weekend in upstate New York. After consulting the combined crystal balls of the internet, work requirements, and my own hope to one day touch down in every country on the planet, the trip was broken into three parts: a long Christmas weekend in Istanbul on the way there, a week in Pakistan itself, and then a few recovery days in Athens on the way out.
As is my usual habit, this wasn’t a terribly well planned trip. In fact, I didn’t even have my visa to Pakistan until the day before I left (thank you, visa fairy!). In any event, Lonely Planet - as it unfailingly has for years - served me well. Based on an LP recommendation, I’d booked a hotel (via email the night before, natch) that sent a driver to the airport. Thus, on a Friday morning I found myself slightly wedged into to the front seat of a Fiat*, heading from Ataturk International Airport to the neighborhood of Sultanahmet, where I would be staying.
The route took us mostly along the water’s edge. The water being the Sea of Marmara (new to me!). Not very talkative at first, the taxi driver started pointing out the best seafood joints along the way. This vegetarian just smiled, nodded, and thanked him. With a “thanks.” See, I hadn’t yet sorted out how to pronounce “teşekkürler“, yet. In fact, I should admit it here - I never did manage to wrap my head around much of the Turkish language. I found, however, that I rarely had a problem with any of the English I spoke between “merhaba” (hello) and “teşekkürler” (thanks). Tis an ugly way to travel, but it’s reliable in a pinch.
Since it was a midday arrival, and I’d not really slept on the way over, I didn’t have any ambitious plans for the afternoon. However, the very nice location of the Hotel Turkoman means that very little ambition is required to secure great reward - this is a view from the balcony:
That’s the Sultanahmet Mosque, more famously known as the Blue Mosque. While I generally seek boutique hotels well off the beaten path, this turned out to be the perfect location for this trip. Situated on the original Hippodrome of Constantinople, it’s easy walking distance to the most famous of Istanbul’s historical sights, and an easy tram ride away from modern Istanbul.
The Hippodrome itself is now paved, better suited to tour buses carrying tourists than chariots carrying racers. 
But it really was fun to stand in the middle of the street, late at night, and imagine the chariots thundering down the very road on which you were standing. And if you need some help to go back in time, all you need do is look to the center median of the southwestern end of the Hippodrome. Standing there are some rather impressive survivors of war, development, and time. There is the Walled Obelsik (10th century, AD), the Serpentine Column (5th Cent, BC), and the Obelisk of Theodosius. It was a bit boggling to realize that it was erected in 390 AD. It was mindblowing when I understood that the obelisk itself (carted off from its original home in Egypt) dates from ~1500 BC.
So it was from this base that my exploration of Istanbul took place over the next few days. The Haiga Sophia was the first stop. Or was that the Ayasofya? Like so many other places in Istanbul, there’s the Byzantine name, and then the Ottoman name. (Go ahead, get it out of the way.) It was first built in the 4th century, but most of the present form was constructed in 537. Look at it. 537.
It was originally built as an Eastern Orthodox church. It then served as a Roman Catholic Church for a bit. By 1453, it had been converted to a mosque. It owes its present form, a museum, to a 1935 order by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (founder of Turkey and generally very smart man, when it came to handling cultural sore points). Between my years living in Europe, and my travels in general, I’ve wandered through no small number of cathedrals. But I’ve never been through one so . . . big.This article (see the Construction section) does a fair job of explaining how the architects achieved the illusion of a largely unsupported dome, but you really have to see it.
Exploration of the Ayasofya was ably assisted by 80 year old Mustafa, a tour guide picked up at the entrance. Until recently, you couldn’t have forced me to use a tour guide, even at gunpoint. I mean, what could I possibly need them for? I’ve always got a good guidebook, and I can the read the signs as well as anyone, right? Well, I’ve come to appreciate tour guides, for a number of reasons. First and foremost - they will always have something that your guidebook doesn’t (now, it may not necessarily be true . . . but hey, we all love a good story, right?). Second, a good guide is able to adapt to your interests (e.g., Icons? Not all that interesting to me. The politics behind the designation of the Ayasofya as a museum, instead of a mosque? Very interesting to me). Finally, I’ve come to see it as my way of contributing to the local economy, since I don’t really buy much when I travel. I find it far more satisfying to put €20 into the hand of a man who has worked at the Ayasofya since the 1930s than blow it on some naff shelf thing that will end up in a box somewhere. In any event, I recommend that you consider using these folks on your next trip. Getting the right one may take a bit of practice, but if you go with your gut assessment of someone in the initial selection, and remember that they are there to guide you (and not you there to pay them), you’ll usually be fine.
Next up: the bazaars of Istanbul, the Bosphorus, and (consensual!) assault & battery.
*Actually, it was a Tofaş Şahin - described on the web as a “Fiat with a facelift.” Ahem. Sure.
December 14th, 2006
This picture was taken from the top of the Zugspitze, which sits along the German/Austrian border. The trip - in addition to being a very nice revisiting of childhood places - was wonderfully cheap. In December 2001, Americans were still afraid to fly anywhere (resulting in very low airfares), and the dollar was strong against the euro. 82 cents for one euro. Flew to Germany for a week, rented a Mercedes, skiied in the Alps, and it still probably didn’t go far beyond $1k, total.
Fast forward five years. I was just pricing flights out of the UK, and I assumed that the exchange rate was somewhere in the $1.50 = £1 range that it has been for years. Except it hasn’t been, it seems. When I went to check it - wow. Nearly $2 to the £1, now.
And the euro? It’s almost flipped places with the dollar. It’ll now take you $1.32 to buy €1. Suddenly, failing to exchange back all those euros I ended the past few trips with doesn’t seem so irresponsible, anymore . . .
December 1st, 2006
I spent a fair part of my early years living quite near the Iron Curtain. My childhood included more than the usual fun of bike rides and playing in the woods - it also included tanks rolling through the street in front of my house, calls in the middle of the night that had my father disappearing for weeks, and planning where I would hide out when the Soviets came.
On one of our school field trips, we went to Observation Point Alpha. We were told that if we stepped past the chain fence, we might get shot. Not a chainlink fence, but these little white posts connected by a single white chain. In retrospect, it was clearly an exaggeration by our guide, but most everyone in my class was aware of all the people that were shot trying to escape East Germany. If they would shoot their own people, they’d most certainly shoot us. When it was my turn to look through the binoculars, I wanted to see the faces of the people who would do that. It was hard to get a good view, but what I did see was this:
they looked just like us.
This is no great observation today, but do you remember what it was like, then? The awful evil scary Communists, lurking around every corner, waiting to kill us all? They looked just like us. It’s hard to describe just how much my world view has been shaped because of that field trip. Not necessarily because of what I saw and felt that day, but because what I saw and felt that day has moved me to question what I’ve been told, and keep asking questions, until I am satisfied.
One of the questions I asked, not so long after that, was of my German teacher, Herr Schmitt. Most of my American teachers would give slight variations on the same pat answer when I asked them about East Germany - “It’s a communist country, and communists are bad. They don’t believe in freedom.” Well, that’s fine, but what does that mean? That was a question that Herr Schmitt, alive when the walls went up and the curtains came down, was willing to answer.
East Germany was a very sad place, he said, because everyone was afraid. They were afraid of Americans, afraid of the Soviets, and afraid of each other. You couldn’t do anything in East Germany without someone knowing about it. If you did something someone thought the government would not approve of, they would tell on you, and it would go in your file. They keep files on normal people, like you and me. And those files are how the government watched people. If someone said or did too many things that the government didn’t like, the Stasi would come and throw them in jail, and their families would never hear from them again.
I don’t recall being entirely convinced, at the time. I mean, how could someone just disappear like that, without the family and everyone else doing something about it? And keeping records on everyone like that? Just seemed silly. Obviously, I didn’t understand.
What got me thinking and writing about this today? This:
[M]illions of Americans and foreigners crossing U.S. borders in the past four years have been assigned scores generated by U.S. government computers rating the risk that the travelers are terrorists or criminals.
[ . . . ]
Virtually every person entering and leaving the United States by air, sea or land is scored by the Homeland Security Department’s Automated Targeting System, or ATS. The scores are based on ATS’ analysis of their travel records and other data, including items such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.
Even better?
The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.
It all feels . . . distantly familiar.
November 29th, 2006
The European Commission has now suggested suspending accession talks with Turkey, in response to Turkey’s continued refusal to open its ports to (Greek) Cyprus. I think suspension of talks would be a big mistake, but at the same time, I wholeheartedly agree with this:
“It is Turkey that must adapt to the EU,” Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. “It’s not the other way around.”
It would take many pages to explain my own conflicted thoughts on what the EU is, and ought to be. For example, it think it should still only comprise the 15 countries it did in 1995, and have stayed at that point until it was clearer on its own purpose and future. But we are where we are, with the EU essentially offering membership, and Turkey clearly wanting it. If Turkey wants it, it is up to Turkey to meet the standards and requirements of the EU. To its credit, it has done quite a bit, and I truly hope that Turkey can gain membership. But the EU needs to be firm in its stance (while remaining continuously engaged), and not be swayed by the pressures of public perception.
And after Turkey becomes a member? The EU enlargement needs to stop. There is far too much internal work to be done to spend any more time on expansion.
November 17th, 2006
Of all the problems in the Netherlands, this seems to be a priority:
The Dutch government announced plans Friday for legislation banning full-length veils in public places and other clothing that covers the face — putting the Netherlands at the forefront of a general European hardening toward Muslim minorities.
Personally, I think the burka is ridiculous, and I generally would prefer that those that I’m speaking to are not in a burka, but legislating against it? I guess the Dutch government wants to make things worse, before they get better.
