French President Nicolas Sarkozy is hitting all the Middle East power centers in a two-day tour of the region. First, he held talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm el-Sheikh. Then it's off to Ramallah to meet with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, before landing in Jerusalem in time for dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. On day two, Sarkozy jets off to Lebanon and Syria.

The French president has tasked himself with the modest goal of negotiating an immediate ceasefire to the carnage in Gaza. Even if he fails to score a diplomatic victory, his whirlwind tour will no doubt represent a triumph of travel booking.

Sarkozy's extremely personal brand of diplomacy has taken him to over 40 countries in the first year and a half of his Presidency. His hyperactive travel schedule has spawned a long list of diplomatic initiatives: he went to Damascus to meet with President Bashar al-Assad, and attempted to enlist the Syrian president in joining his Union of the Mediterranean. He traveled to Moscow and Tblisi during the Russian invasion of Georgia, attempting to arrange a ceasefire.

He visited Abu Dhabi to sign a deal establishing a French naval base in the emirate, making it the only Western power other than the United States to have a permanent military installation in the Gulf. He paired with Gordon Brown to launch an initiative aimed at ending the genocide in Darfur, caused a diplomatic row with its traditional ally Morocco by first visiting its regional rival Algeria, and enraged many Africans by highlighting the positive aspects of European colonialism during a speech in Senegal.

All this travel has caused France's 2009 travel and entertainment budget for Sarkozy to balloon 29% over the previous year, to $55 million. The French taxpayers are getting precious few diplomatic victories for their money, but many headlines. And that seems to suit them just fine. Sarkozy's trips have raised France's international profile, much to the pleasure of many French voters. Whether the people of Gaza will reap any of the benefits of Sarkozy's diplomacy, however, remains to be seen.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Another cold Russian winter, another dispute about Russian gas prices. Time's Yuri Zarakhavich has a useful summary:

In the buildup to Dec. 31, Russia accused Ukraine of having arrears of more than $2 billion on its expired gas contract. Ukraine said that it had paid all its debt. Moscow said it would start charging a new price, which it presented as both the "market" price and a "preferential" rate—just $250 rather a sharp rise on the 2008 price of $179.5 per 1000 cubic meters of gas. Ukraine said that it could pay $201.

In response, Gazprom, Russia's state-run natural gas monopoly, dropped its "preferential" offer and said it would have to charge the real "market" rate of $418. It also insists that Ukraine still owes Moscow $ 614 million, and, at 10am on Jan. 1, turned off gas taps to Ukraine.

Pretty much the same thing has happened for the last three winters. Worried about its own supply, the EU is anxiously working to broker a compromise between Ukraine and Russia. As a European Commission representative said:

"Since we are the main market for Russian gas ... we have an obvious interest in applying pressure on these parties to reach as soon as possible an agreement which is definitive."

It's easy enough to cast Gazprom -- a state monopoly with a penchant for heavy-handed ultimatums -- as the villain in this recurring drama. But that lets Europe off the hook a bit too easily. As energy investor Jérôme Guillet wrote for FP during the 2007 edition of the dispute, Gazprom doesn't behave all that differently from any other company and it's demonization is a convenient way for European leaders to divert attention from their lack of a coherent energy policy:

[I]t’s a bit rich to see the supposedly pro-market Westerners calling for heavy subsidies. And a country like Ukraine that’s angling to join NATO (an organization that Russia understandably perceives as anti-Russian) can hardly expect a discount on its gas. So why is Russia getting demonized for defending its interests? The answer lies with European leaders, who are trying to distract the public from the mess they’ve made of European energy policy. Europeans themselves are to blame for their dependency on Gazprom, which is doing what any company would do in its place. [...]

As for European leaders, they have no one but themselves to blame for turning worrying domestic gas problems into a major international crisis. Europe, led by the United Kingdom, has made a conscious choice to rely on gas as its main new source of energy at a time when its domestic supplies are declining—and declining a lot faster than everybody expected. And Europe’s economic liberalization encourages market players to build easier-to-finance gas-fired plants, thus feeding demand for more gas. If political leaders were really worried about gas supplies from Russia, they should change that structural feature of the market rather than wailing about Gazprom’s clumsy—but ultimately harmless—fights with its neighbors.

Two years after Guillet wrote that, Europe is still just as dependent on Russia for its energy supply, meaning that this New Year's tradition is likely to continue. If the corner store continually rips you off, yet you continue to patronize it, can you really keep blaming the store?

Photo: SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images

For much of late 2007, Belgium looked like it was on the verge of being split in two as Flemish and Wallonian politicians struggled to form a government that would preserve national unity. At one point, erstwhile Prime Minister Yves Leterme even said that there was nothing holding the country together but "the king, the football team, some beers."

Now, Leterme has been forced to step down, along with his entire government, not because of nationalist sentiment, but because of an old-fashioned banking scandal. Leterme and his ministers are accused of applying undue pressure to push through a bargain-basement sale of Belgium's partially-nationalized bank Fortis to the French bank BNP Paribas, at the expense of Belgian workers and shareholders. King Albert is now struggling to find a prime minister who is both untainted by "Fortisgate" and capable of keeping the fragile Flemish-Walloon coalition intact. No easy task.

The financial crisis and government responses seem to be having interesting effects on nationalist sentiment in Europe. In Scotland, nationalist parties saw their cause set way back by the UK government's massive bailouts of Scottish banks, which made the idea of Scottish self-sufficiency look patently ridiculous. In Belgium, it seems like Flemish nationalists could be emboldened by the central government's failure and will likely continue to make the case that the poorer French-speaking Wallonia is a drag on the national economy. This could make keeping the place intact all the more challenging.

An undersea cable near Egypt in the Mediterranean was cut today, disrupting Internet access for millions:

The main damage through is to the four submarine cables running across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal.

It is thought that 65% of traffic to India was down, while services to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan have also been severely affected.

The cause of the cut is unknown though there was some seismic activity recorded near Malta. This certainly seems like a pretty serious story:

Jonathan Wright - director of wholesale products at Interoute which manages part of the optical fibre network - told the BBC that the effects of the break would be felt for many days.

"This will grind economies to a halt for a short space of time," he said "If you look at, say, local financial markets who trade with European and US markets, the speed at which they get live data will be compromised." [...]

"We've lost three out of four lines. If the fourth cable breaks, we're looking at a total blackout in the Middle East," said Mr Wright.

"These three circuits account for 90% of the traffic and we're going to see more international phone calls dropping and a huge degradation in the quality of local internet,"

 

If financial transactions as far away as Singapore were really blocked by a minor undersea earthquake near Malta, it's a pretty sobering reminder of the fragile physical ties that make our virtual world possible.

Today, the last publicly viewable statue of fascist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco on the European continent was taken down in the city of Santander:

To commemorate this occasion, here's a look at some other notable statue-topplings:

Nov. 2, 1956: Residents of Budapest, Hungary, destroy a statue of Stalin during a demonstration against communist domination. The statue had been toppled Oct. 23, 1956, at 9:30 p.m.

Aug. 22, 1991: A crowd watches the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka (a predecessor of the KGB), being toppled in Moscow.

Aug. 23, 1991: The statue of Lenin is dismantled in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius as the government banned the Communist Party. Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 and declared its independence in 1990.

April 9, 2003: Iraqis watch a statue of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein falling in Baghdad. Before it fell, a U.S. marine had briefly covered its head with an American flag. The impression it conveyed of conquest rather than liberation prompted the U.S. military to bar display of the U.S. flag in most circumstances.

Nov. 23, 2003: Protesters topple a papier-mâché statue of U.S. President George W. Bush in central London. They were demonstrating against the state visit of Bush to Britain and the war in Iraq.

Oct. 13, 2007: A man jumps on a statue of former Mexican President Vicente Fox in Boca del Rio. The statue, which was going to be unveiled the next day, was knocked down by a group of unidentified people.

Photos: RAFA RIVAS/AFP/Getty Images, AFP/Getty Images, ANATOLY SAPRONENKOV/AFP/Getty Images, WOJTEK DRUSZCZ/AFP/Getty Images, PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images, EVA-LOTTA JANSSON/AFP/Getty Images, SAUL RAMIREZ/AFP/Getty Images

When Nicolas Sarkozy named Bernard Kouchner as France's foreign minister, we all wondered whether the Médicins Sans Frontières founder could reconcile his passion for human rights with the exigencies of raison d'êtat.

Now, it seems, he's admitted he can't:

"I think I was wrong to ask for a ministry of state for human rights. It was a mistake," Dr Kouchner told Le Parisien newspaper. The remarks were particularly shocking, coming from the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières and proponent of the "right to intervention" in countries that abuse human rights.

The reason for Dr Kouchner’s regrets? "There is a permanent contradiction between human rights and the foreign policy of a state, even in France," he said.

Photo: ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images

"Our British friends are now cutting their value-added tax. We have no idea how much of that stores will pass on to customers. Are you really going to buy a DVD player because it now costs £39.10 instead of £39.90? All this will do is raise Britain’s debt to a level that will take a whole generation to work off.

"The same people who would never touch deficit spending are now tossing around billions. The switch from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism is breathtaking."

Steinbrück may be forced to hold his nose when German bankers, ministers, and economists meet next week to discuss their own stimulus measures. Chancellor Angela Merkel is said to be moving closer to the British position.

The BBC's Malcolm Brabant says the turmoil in Greece is not as bad as it looks and the country's government is likely to survive:

Wednesday's general strike may have inconvenienced Athenian commuters and provided some dramatic television footage of riot policemen defending themselves against volleys of stones and petrol bombs. But the size of the rallies in Syntagma was embarrassingly small for the trades unions.

If the square had been packed with hundreds of thousands of angry citizens from a cross-section of Greek society, then the government might be looking decidedly wobbly.More telling was the sight of the dawn rush hour, full of private sector employees trying to get to work before public transport shut down and police buses sealed off the thoroughfares.

Revolution? No thanks! Too busy trying to earn a living in a difficult economic climate!

"[I]s there any other European country this close to boiling point?" asks P.O. Neill of A Fistful of Euros. Judging by the pictures of the ongoing chaos in Greece, I'd say it's already at a good boil.

Anti-police rioting throughout the country is not in its fifth day, a general strike has effectively shut the country down in opposition to economic reforms, and the ruling conservative government seems entirely unable to maintain control over the country.

There's been very little discussion of the chaos by international pundits and bloggers. I suspect this is because no one really knows what to make of it. A number of recent Greek political scandals and growing youth anarchist movement should have been taken as warning signs, but the conventional wisdom on Greece has been that it's a fast-modernizing society and a model of European integration. This week, however, it's looked a lot more like its Balkan neighbors to the north.

As one student protester told the Guardian:

There were many reasons why these riots happened. The situation was explosive, socially and economically. The state undermines people. You feel it is violating your rights. At some point the lid was going to burst.

It's an explosion that very few outside of Greece saw coming.

Photos: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

Last Friday Vittorio de Filippis, former publisher of the left-wing Libération newspaper, was - according to press reports - seized at his home before dawn, handcuffed in front of two young boys and whisked off for interrogation by an investigating magistrate. Police told him he was "worse than scum" and kept him for five hours in a cell with no access to a lawyer. Oh, and he was strip-searched twice and subjected to "body cavity" examinations.

Haiti? Côte d'Ivoire?

Nope. France.

Via Andreas Persbo, some art for arms control geeks. At last:

More:

The artist is Lisa Ruyter. Timothy Hartley Smith has photos of the exhibit.

Der Spiegel's Manfred Ertel thinks it's not out of the question:

Fishing, mostly of halibut, cod and crabs, is Greenland's main source of revenue. Without generous subsidies from Copenhagen, the government of the former colony would have gone bankrupt long ago. The Danish government injects 3.2 billion Danish kroner (€430 million, or $550 million) into its Arctic outpost each year, or about 50 percent of the budget.

But for how much longer? On Nov. 25, Greenlanders will decide in a referendum whether the current system of self-administration in health care, education, culture and fishery should be followed by economic and foreign policy autonomy, and eventually by complete independence. After the referendum, the decision will be up to the parliaments in Nuuk and Copenhagen. Island residents are extremely optimistic.

Photo: Uriel Sinai

... in Europe?

Motor-industry executives say it is difficult to predict what might happen in the event of Ford or GM collapsing.

“It would be an enormous blow across the entire European industry,” said Professor Peter Cooke, a car-industry expert at the University of Buckingham Business School. “And, of course, it extends well beyond their direct operations to thousands of suppliers that make components and provide services.” [...]

Motor-industry leaders are stepping up their lobbying of European politicians in a search for financial aid similar to that being discussed in Washington.

European finance ministers will discuss the details of a €40 billion loan package at a meeting on December 2.

You gotta love it when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin goes uncensored while on official business, as he did during talks with Nicholas Sarkozy when the French president was at the Kremlin trying to forge a cease-fire after Russia invaded Georgia. In an attempt to illustrate just how hard he planned to lay the smack down on Georgia, Putin told Sarkozy, "I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls," referring to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

Wait, it gets better:

Mr Sarkozy responded: "Hang him?"

"Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein," said Mr Putin.

Mr Sarkozy replied, using the familiar "tu": "Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?" Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then replied: "Ah, you have scored a point there."

The inside info on the Godfather-esque sitdown is via Sarkozy's chief foreign policy advisor, Jean-David Levitte, who disclosed the details of the French president's August meeting with Putin to Le Nouvel Observateur today. According to Levitte, Sarkozy was aware of Putin's plan to oust Saakashvili and warned against it.

Sarkozy reassured Saakashvili in Paris today that he'd be looking out for Georgia during tomorrow's meeting with EU leaders and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Nice.

On French radio, also today, the Georgian president reacted to Putin's threat by laughing nervously, responding that he'd heard something of the comments but not in such detail. "It's funny, all the same," he told the interviewer.

Photo: FILE; HRVOJE POLAN/AFP/Getty Images

Approximately 2,500 sheep took to the streets of Marseille, in southern France, on Nov. 9 as part of a demonstration of breeders and shepherds who are protesting the crisis in the ovine sector and demanding more government assistance.

The banner reads:"Barnier, go to the end …; Sarko, think about us!!" (Michel Barnier is France's agricultural minister, and Sarko, of course, refers to President Nicolas Sarkozy.)

Great quote from European Commission agriculture spokesman Michael Mann:

"Next Wednesday is a new dawn for the bendy cucumber and the amusingly shaped carrot."

The news is that the commission is voting tomorrow on whether to ditch its infamous "marketing standards" for produce, a favorite target of ridicule for euroskeptics. Among other rules, the standards specified that cucumbers sold within Europe had to be "practically straight (maximum height of the arc: 10 mm per 10 cm of the length of cucumber)."

Eliminating the draconian standards is the right thing to do in a time of high global food prices and a smart move for the EU's image. Bring on the amusing carrots!

Despite the greater-than-expected losses reported by Ford and GM today, such abysmal results fail to surprise anyone these days. The U.S. car industry's "Big Three" have lumbered on with bloated bureaucracies and product lines for many years now. But what the financial crisis has done is bring into sharp relief which carmakers are poised for survival and which are destined for the scrap heap.

Carmakers the world over have been hurting. Sales at BMW fell 8.3 percent in October, while Toyota recently cut its year-end profit forecast by 63 percent. The outlook is particularly bad for Europe, since 60-80 percent of car purchases there use credit-financing, the availability of which continues to shrink, while only 30 percent of car purchases in Japan are credit-financed. Meanwhile, slower automobile production in Europe is also taking a major toll on U.S. parts suppliers, adding insult to injury as the suppliers' prospects have already tanked with the car industry at home.

But even if carmakers everywhere are suffering, what sets apart a company like Toyota, currently the world's largest car manufacturer, is cash. Toyota has $18.5 billion in cash and a steady hand on those reserves. As for General Motors, flagging sales have caused the company to burn through $6.9 billion in cash in the last quarter alone. Fewer people are buying cars, but GM still has to pay its bills -- employee's wages, the costs of running factories, etc. Now, GM admits it may drop below $11 billion in cash reserves, the minimum it needs to pay those bills, before the year is out. That means bankruptcy. Ford is slightly doing better, but not by much.

So, can U.S. automakers still stage a comeback? They're already behind on fuel economy and alternative energy. GM has some big projects in the works, but it might not survive long enough to see them through. Millions of jobs are at stake, and President-elect Barack Obama seems to favor providing some aid to automakers. But we'll have to see if taxpayers want to get involved. They're probably still reeling from buyer's remorse after scooping up Fannie Mae and AIG.

Guess we know who isn't getting the first White House visit:

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi today praised Barack Obama, saying the U.S. president-elect is "young, handsome and also tanned."

Berlusconi, speaking in Italian during a press conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow, said he was sure he would get along well with Obama because he is "giovane, bello, e abbronzato."

Later, when he returned to his hotel, Berlusconi said his comment "was a big compliment," Italy's state news wire Ansa reported. "If some people don't have a sense of humor, then it's their problem," he said, according to Ansa. Only "imbeciles" would interpret his comments as derogatory, Berlusconi was quoted as saying by Ansa.

On the other hand, maybe Silvio could become vice president...

The above is an aerial view of a humongous portrait of U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, sculpted in gravel and sand by American artist Jorge Rodriguez Gerada on a Barcelona beachfront, on Nov. 3. The project is called Expectation, and it required a civil engineering firm, a topographer, machinery for clearing the area, and gravel as a filler, among other things.

Information provided with the photo says:

The outsize scale allows the artist to allude to the global impact on the eve of his [Obama's] election. It both embodies the immense sense of hope felt by Barack Obanma's [sic] supporters and raises a mirror to reflect the source of that hope.

Photo: LLUIS GENE/AFP/Getty Images