June 2010

Will Israel have to pay a price for its latest assault? Despite international opinion and damage to relations with Turkey and the Arab world, the answer is likely to be noThe Israeli assault on the flotilla bringing aid to Gaza on 31 May has been generally condemned. It is hard to support an act of piracy in international waters, especially when it kills 10 people. The disproportionate force and the deliberate nature of the assault rightly make us indignant.
How can we comprehend Israel’s (...)

Prime Minister Hatoyama’s resignation at the beginning of June highlights Japan’s dilemma. It wants an eastern equivalent of the EU to guarantee stability and trade. But who will join, and will the US accept Japan’s exit from a co-dependency guaranteed by treaty since the end of the second world war?

Japan’s military exploits in Asia and the Pacific during the second world war are better known than the more tentative, yet interesting, military and diplomatic successes of the country during the first world war – when it was allied with Britain and France

The financial sector has to be reduced in scale and importance in Europe, and the EU needs a strong central bank and an integrated fiscal system. In fact, everything that isn’t being considered in the current euro panic

German chancellor Angela Merkel says: ‘If the euro fails, Europe fails’. To save the single currency, the European Central Bank has abandoned all its prudent principles. But what is really being saved? The currency, Europe’s weaker economies – or the banks?

Will those who sign the cheques continue to write our laws? There is at last popular resistance to currency speculation, and it is forcing governments to distance themselves from the financial industry. Although hardly far enough

Operation Clean Hands was supposed to have reduced, if not removed, financial corruption from the Italian 
government back in 1992. Some hopes. The bribery offences have given way to fraudulent speculation in public 
assets, and bankers have joined politicians in sinning

A quarter of a billion euros have been misappropriated from public funds on the Balearic Islands. 
A few elected representatives have been found guilty already, and jailed

The financial crisis in the eurozone highlights Germany’s economic dominance, not just in Europe but in the world. In parallel, over its tumultuous history, the country has handled its external relationships with discretion and care, no matter who was in power

A new detention centre at Le Mesnil-Amelot on the periphery of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport (postponed at the last minute) was to be part of the ever-growing expulsion machine; control of migrants is now coordinated at European level by deals that shift the surveillance of frontiers towards the East and South. The cost in human lives is rising

Senegal seemed to be a good, though not model, functioning African democracy. Now its authoritarian president wants to put his son on the ‘throne’, and the family and its supporters are at the heart of corruption scandals

Indonesian nationalists deny all ethnic and religious claims for separatism in the vast archipelago that makes up their country. But in Papua, people feel exploited, and threatened with cultural, and demographic, annihilation

Wasn’t the fall of the Berlin Wall supposed to set the world free and end history? In the 20 years since, communities worldwide 
have voluntarily retreated behind walls and security cameras