Which is going to arrive/leave from platorm 3. So I am on platform 3.

The station has 6 platforms. Number 6 is by the exit, and is reached by stairway 1. Numbers 5/4 (different ends of the same platform) and 3 are reached by stairway 2.

Platforms 1 and 2 are reached by stairway 3.

So, does the Hamburg Express arrive/leave from platform three, as the listings, my ticket and the station announcements all say? No, of course it doesn’t, silly. It leaves from platform 1 which is above stairway 3.

When I talk to the train conductor (who is having a quick breath of fresh air at the halt and this being an international train yes, he speaks English) he says yes, Platform 3 means up stairway 3, not anything as stupid as what is actually marked as platform 3.

Dang, why are the English so dim? Are you a conservative or something?

Ho hum. And that is today’s news from parts foreign.

The Prime Minister added: “In the spirit of this healthy competition with France… If France goes for a financial transactions tax, then the door will be open and we will be able to welcome many French banks to the United Kingdom and we’ll expand our economy that way.”

“If France wants to be so mindbogglingly stupid about it then we’ll take advantange of having a mark at the table, don’t you worry.”

Here’s what the real problem is though. Are the French actually so mindbogglingly ignorant and stupid as to think that an FTT is a good idea? Or have they something up their sleeve?

It’s possible that they do think it’s a good idea: economics/finance has never been something that the Enarques quite get. They tend to see politics and the decisions of technocrats as somehow over ruling the movements of markets. Certainly they believe they should and they might even believe they do.

Or it could be that they know that an FTT is a bad idea, most especially one imposed in only one country inside a Single Market with the free movement of capital, companies and labour. But they’ve got some ace up their sleeve: perhaps they’ll use the movement of business resulting from the FTT as an argument for its extension?

Anyone any ideas?

Two bombs planted by Irish Republican Army dissidents detonated on Thursday night in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry, but no injuries were reported as police quickly evacuated the area following phoned warnings.

This is pretty much the way it’s been going for a century now.

One group starts to fight for that United Ireland free of the British. They fight, there’s some movement or not some movement towards the goal, those fighting die, grow old perhaps, and compromise on the new status quo and stop fighting. But then there’s a new generation who regard the new status quo as not enough and decide to take up arms for the next leap towards the goal. Old IRA, Real IRA, 32 County and so on…..I’m sure I’ve left one of more generations out of this.

Note that I don’t say that this is entirely accurate in detail, only that it’s possible to see this pattern. Which makes this:

“These are the desperate actions of yesterday’s men. They seem to be more wedded to the struggle than to the cause they claim to be pursuing,” said David Ford, justice minister of the unity government.

Inaccurate. They’re doing exactly what every previous generation has done. Exactly what McGuinness and Adams did, refuse to take the settlement reached by the previous generation as acceptable and taken up arms to over turn that settlement.

Yes, they’re still terrrorists, vile scum who will kill the innocent for vague political goals, but they’re hardly doing anything unusual in the history of Irish Republicanism.

Newt Gingrich has pledged that on his first day as president he will set up a constitutional showdown by ordering the military to defy a supreme court ruling extending some legal rights to foreign terrorism suspects and captured enemy combatants in US custody.

The Republican contender told a forum of anti-abortion activists ahead of South Carolina’s primary election that as president he would ignore supreme court rulings he regards as legally flawed. He implied that would also extend to the 1973 decision, Roe vs Wade, legalising abortion.

“If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, the president can in fact ignore it,” said Gingrich to cheers.

The oath is to uphold the Constitution. And it’s the Supreme Court that decides, barring amendments to that Constitution, what that Constitution is.

Which leads to more than a little amusement. If there were a President Gingrich (God Forbid….and I’m afraid that I can’t see any in the current race (from any party) that I would actually want to have that office. Yes, even Ron Paul, there’s some good stuff there but some very weird too) then he’d be impeached as soon as one of these stand offs occured. And rightly so of course.

The amusement would come from the way in which it would be the outraged left which would lead the impeachment charge and, if he’s tried and convicted and refuses to leave, then quite possibly removed from office by the military at the instruction of the Supreme Court.

You know, exactly what happened in Honduras and boy, didn’t the US left complain about that?

It’s delicately referred to as Santorum’s “Google Problem“.

Nothing illustrates this better than what Mr Santorum calls his “Google problem”, which has been an irritation for nine years.

In retaliation for his comparing gay relationships with bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery, gay rights activists flooded the internet with graphic false claims about what his surname really meant.

This explicit description remains the top web search result for the former Pennsylvania senator, a 53-year-old father of seven children.

Well, no, it’s not the top result. The Wikipedia entry about it is, then there’s his own Wikipedia entry and then, at least on my version of the results, comes the entry which is indeed his problem.

The basic background is that he did something (can’t remember what) to piss off Dan Savage, the sex columnist at the Village Voice. Who then launched a campaign to get a new meaning associated with the word santorum.

Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.

That is something of a problem. That the dastardly liberals have done this to him might whip up his base among the die hard cultural conservatives but a politician who is being laughed at really does have a problem.

As to who I want to win, well, it’s not my country, not something I have a vote in but Santorum would be a retrograde step I think. To put it mildly. Romney, well, there’s a problem again. I think that the worst thing that Obama has done is his horrible mangling of health care reform. Given that this is based on Romneycare (ie, what Romney instituted when Gov of Massachussetts) then that’s not something that would be undone or corrected under Romney.

Other than Gary Johnson (who has no hope at all, sadly) the rest of the Repubs are worse. And it isn’t as if Obama’s been all that good on anything is it?

Doesn’t bode well for the American Republic that they’re going to end up choosing from among that bunch of political pygmies and outright idiots.

Sarko will lose the presidency to a socialist no one has ever heard of, who will beat Marine le Pen by less than 5% of the (low turn out) popular vote in the run off;

No. The result I would want is for Marine Le Pen to win the presidency.

No, not because I’m some ghastly Poujadist, racist or in love with women named after military forces.

On the same grounds that I wanted Obama to become President of the US actually.

I didn’t think he’d be any good as President (and how right I was!) and I seriously doubt that she would be a good President of France either.

However, having a black man as President of the United States seriously pissed off a large number of people I think should be pissed off. And Marine Le Pen as President of France would seriously piss off a large, if different, group of people I think should be pissed off. Namely, every single correct thinker anywhere to the left of Genghis Khan.

I just think that it will be so amusing to watch the explodey heads of the entire political, journalistic, third sector, academic and generally right on classes.

Would it be champagne or camembert that they would agree to boycott?

Fire brigades are still struggling to put out the fire which quickly engulfed the submarine’s rubber-coated outer hull.

OK, nuclear sub, missiles, rubber coating on hull, all terribly advanced technology.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said there has been no radiation leak from the fire, which began last night on wooden scaffolding.

Err, what? Propping up a billion or more’s worth of technology with wooden scaffolding?

The French government just doesn’t seem to understand the real implications of the euro, the single currency that France shares with 16 other European Union countries.

French officials have now reacted to the prospect of a credit rating downgrade by lashing out at Britain. The head of the central bank, Christian Noyer, has argued that the rating agencies should begin by downgrading Britain. The finance minister, Francois Baroin, recently declared that, “You’d rather be French than British in economic terms.” And even the French Prime minister, Francois Fillar, noted that Britain had higher debt and larger deficits than France.

French officials apparently don’t recognize the importance of the fact that Britain is outside the eurozone, and therefore has its own currency, which means that there is no risk that Britain will default on its debt. When interest and principal on British government debt come due, the British government can always create additional pounds to meet those obligations. By contrast, the French government and the French central bank cannot create euros.

Just further proof that there hasn’t been a Frenchman who understands economics since Frederic Bastiat and he died in 1850.

In August 1991, when Communist party hardliners tried to wrest back power, fear was the magic component they lacked. Some people got scared, to be sure – but enough did not. Radio journalists continued reporting on the coup and finding ways to broadcast even when their signal was repeatedly cut off and their offices were invaded by special forces. Print journalists from several newspapers that had been shut down got together to put out a joint publication they called the Common Newspaper. And ordinary people, including college students, professionals, and former army military men, flooded into the streets to protect the Moscow white house where Boris Yeltsin sat, personifying democracy.

Bernard Levin, the late great Bernard Levin, identified the exact moment when the whole edifice came tumbling down.

That crowd, around Boris, the hardliners had someone shout over the loudspeakers that the crowd was ordered to disperse. Or terrible things, they knew not what but they would be the terror of the Earth, would be done by the KGB.

And the crowd laughed.

Exeunt USSR.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, furious that the British were lobbing in their own last-minute demands when everyone else was there to save the euro, told the prime minister: “You can’t have an offshore centre taking Europe’s capital.”

1) It ain’t Europe’s capital. It might belong to copmpanies, individuals, pension funds, whatever, but it doesn’t belong to a continent. Not even to a political structure.

2) The City doesn’t “take” capital. It allocates it. It’s a conduit, that’s all.

We should follow the first and second Mrs. Sarkozy and divorce the pint sized ignorant.

“Russia without Putin! Russia without Putin!” they roared as they craned their necks to glimpse and hear the slightly-built internet blogger who had just taken to the open-air stage.

Only last year beaten to within an inch of his life for writing something the authorities did not like, Oleg Kashin appeared to be without fear as he addressed his audience, at the biggest anti-government rally to be held in Russia for two decades.

“The most powerful weapon we have,” he declared, reading from a statement, “is a sense of our own dignity. We must not take it on and off like we would a velvet jacket.”

Oh, so you think they won the election at the weekend then?

No, I said that they’re going to be the next government.

But Paris is almost entirely unanimous on one point: that Epstein’s very readable piece is predicated on an assumption of competence by the UMP dirty tricks department that’s nothing short of fantastic. “That lot couldn’t conspire their way out of a paper bag” is the consensus.

It’s not the most flattering of explanations but it does have the ring of truth to it.

Actually, in at least one case, an accusation of sexual assault on a white woman.

100 years ago they would have lynched Cain even for the allegation. Today they’re still mulling over whether he should be a Presidential candidate.

Yes, it’s still possible to see “black man as voracious sexual predator” (you might have to squint hard but you can see it in some of the reactions) but I would submit that this is an advance, that the place has got better over the past century.

Trains, planes and ferries were at a standstill today as Portugal held what unions said was the biggest general strike for 20 years, with factories shutting down and the former president Mário Soares urging people to fight “international financial anarchy”.

I didn’t actually notice a thing.

Nothing around here was any different at all.

This much is in fact already generally known.

The question is going to be, do they find billions of debt, tens of billions of debt or, dear lord, hundreds of billions of debt?

If they believably only find billions then Spanish bonds might improve. Hundreds of billions and, well, it’s Greece again, innit?

Herr Ministerpräsident, sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Ich kann nur „guten Tag“ sagen, aber meine Kinder lernen Deutsch.

English here.

the woman quoted just below is a student at Harvard University, one of several of whom recently walked out of Greg Mankiw’s EC10 course:

“I’m someone who lives below the poverty line, my family’s extremely poor.  And having a class like this that promotes gaining at the expense of millions of people disturbs me and bothers me at my core,” freshman Amanda Bradley told National Public Radio.

There you have it, folks!  In today’s America, even some poor Americans – people who admit to living “below the poverty line” – are enrolled at Harvard University.

I should add something to this though. I have a colleague who is a Fellow at Harvard. He’s less than convinced that the place is recruiting students from the top end of the IQ spectrum these days.

Michel Barnier, the EU markets commissioner, said he wanted to ban credit rating agencies from rating bonds from bailed-out countries. He told French radio that the agencies could lose the “right to rate certain countries for a certain time that are receiving an international support programme from the IMF or European Union.” But few could see how the ban could be imposed.

The ignorance is of course that the agencies don’t cause the bond prices.

Plus there’s that little liberty and freedom thing: what do you mean someone cannot give their opinion on whether someone is going to pay off their borrowings or not? It’s an opinion: free speech ‘n’all that.

But even leaving all that aside: what he’s really complaining about is that markets have a mind of their own, do not do what politicians tell them to do. Something for which we’re all profoundly grateful but I do understand why a French politician wouldn’t feel that way.

“Playing in the World Cup was a dream and playing in New Zealand was special. What other time are you going to play in New Zealand? The five planes it took us to get there was worth the trip,” he said.

“The local people embraced us completely and made us feel at home. In Blenheim, our host town, they even put up the road signs in Cyrillic. They don’t get many Russian visitors there, they had done it for us.”

Yes, well done. Clap clap clap.

He was brought up in Zelonograd, a large town north-west of Moscow with a proud rugby history. He took up the sport at the age of nine but it took off when his parents sent him to Dublin to improve his English.

And that is amusing too. Zelenograd was built to be the Soviet version of Silicon Valley. All electronics and chip making. Must be the only place on the planet where the geeks play rugby.