Keys Corner

From today’s Guardian:

The European Union is preparing plans to allow pig remains to be used to feed poultry. The practice – banned in Europe after the BSE crisis 10 years ago – would save farmers millions of pounds as prices of cereal feed for chickens soar, say officials in Brussels.

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The justification for this idea is that chickens are omnivorous (they eat worms when they are pecking on the ground). One more reason for us to continue not eating meat.

Next time we drive past Maastricht, we are going to take a look at Selexyz Dominicanen. There’s an article in the Guardian architecture section about this book shop in a converted church, and it looks spectacular. The architects were Merkx + Girod, and the photo above is from their website..

In Germany, if something is ridiculously expensive for what it is, we refer to it having an Apothekenpreis (pharmacy price). If you’ve seen a typical Germany pharmacy (or chemist), you’ll understand why. They are usually fitted out with the top-of-the-market shop fittings and very well-staffed. Which means that we pay 2 or 3 times as much for common drugs such as aspirin in Germany compared to the UK or the USA.

That could be about to change. Medco Health Solutions have just acquired a majority interest in the Dutch internet company Europa Apotheek Venlo, who sell medication and drugs on the German market. Europa Apotheek provides a centralized dispensing-by-mail service through drop-off locations in Drogerie Markt stores, Germany’s second largest drug store chain – a distribution model similar to Medco’s system, pioneered in the United States.

Medco had net revenues of 17 billion dollars from its internet business last year, and will very likely shake up the staid German market, which would be no bad thing – unless you happen to run a pharmacy.

When I read this in today’s Guardian, my first reaction was “but it’s not the 1st of April yet”. One the one hand data privacy experts in the EU has been fighting tooth and nail over the last years to prevent the USA getting a pile of personal data each time someone flies to or from the USA; on the other hand, the EU is considering similar measures, which the UK is lobbying to extend to track EU citizens traveling within the EU:

Passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to “profile” suspects.

Brussels officials are already considering controversial anti-terror plans that would collect up to 19 pieces of information on every air passenger entering or leaving the EU. Under a controversial agreement reached last summer with the US department of homeland security, the EU already supplies the same information [19 pieces] to Washington for all passengers flying between Europe and the US.

But Britain wants the system extended to sea and rail travel, to be applied to domestic flights and those between EU countries…

In fact, according to a recent article by John Lettice, some of the protest from the EU against the USA’s data collection is caused because the EU bureaucracy has been unable to coordinate an agreement with the USA fast enough to stop the USA forming bilateral agreements with some EU-states which don’t have a visa waiver agreement in place with the USA, thus undermining the EU’s position when negotiating deals with the USA. Given that the UK government has been regularly involuntarily leaking data about millions of its citizens recently (lost DVDs and CDs have become a regular topic in the British press in the last 2-3 months), this enthusiasm for collecting even more data really can’t be considered a good idea.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued a stark warning on Sunday to Europeans, saying that their safety from terrorist attack by Islamic extremists is directly linked to NATO’s success in stabilizing Afghanistan. After weeks of calling on NATO governments to send more combat troops and trainers to Afghanistan, Mr. Gates made his case directly to people across the continent in a keynote address to an international security conference here…

Well, I disagree with the implied criticism that some countries are not pulling their military weight. The US-lead wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have encouraged terrorism in Europe and alienated moderate Muslems. The answer is to supply aid to the citizens of these countries and not charge around their countries acting like Rambo. For a different view, take a look at Marc Sageman’s article in last week’s New Scientist. Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist, sociologist, former CIA case officer and a consultant for various US government agencies – so I think he is as qualified to talk about fighting terrorism as Gates, yet he comes to a completely different conclusion (subscription required to view full article):

...The key to the modern terrorist network is the collective discourse on internet forums, which provides general guidance and tactical instruction to the participants in the absence of the command hierarchies of traditional terrorist organisations. It also fosters a true conversation among the participants – it is impossible to anticipate where a given discussion will lead. The result is that each small local terrorist network pursues its own activity for its own local reasons, and in doing so promotes the overall goals and strategy of the Al-Qaida terrorist social movement far more effectively than any central command could. This explains why governments’ bureaucratic and ideological approach to tackling terrorism – pursuing high-value targets in the hope the movement will implode – is bound to fail.

What, then, should governments do? Their strategy should be twofold. First, they should continue to seek to eliminate violent networks, and ensure the fair prosecution of captured terrorists in a transparent way in order to regain the trust of Muslim communities worldwide. Any campaign against terrorism must be focused exclusively on the perpetrators, and not on racial or ethnic groups in general. It is when Muslims are indiscriminately censured that they become angry. It is also worth remembering that the most effective way to rob terrorism of its glory is to reduce the terrorists to common criminals. There is no glory in being taken to prison in handcuffs.

The second strategy is to contain the threat and wait until it disappears for internal reasons. Young people follow fashions and define themselves in contrast to their elders. They worship fashionable “jihadi heroes”, but fashions come and go. If we have the good sense to allow the leaderless jihad to fade away, it should do so in years rather than generations. The aim should be to accelerate the process of internal decay by avoiding any action – such as the invasion of Iraq – that could prolong and invigorate this violent movement. A military strategy, for example, is completely counterproductive because it creates more terrorists than it eliminates.

Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic all join the Schengen Zone tonight.

That is the part of the EU where the member countries trust each other enough to abolish the visa- and border controls (But beware! At airports, the new members won’t benefit from the abolition of controls until the end of March in 2008). In the member countries of the Schengen Agreement, when crossing the border to another member country you don’t need to show your passport or ID, and don’t need a visa to enter the country. It speeds up arrival at sea- and airports and means there are no border controls on road links. The member countries also share data on criminals via the Schengen Information System and their police forces cooperate with each other to fight crime.

The new members bring nearly all of the European countries into the zone – even some non-EU countries such as Norway and Iceland are members, and Switzerland joined in 2004, but will actually implement the changes in 2008.

You can probably guess that the only major European country which will then not belong is the same country where a leading national paper is alleged to have run the headline “Fog In Channel: Continent Cut Off“. Well, that’s not quite true – as well as the UK, the Republic of Ireland has not implemented the reduction of border controls either.

The Economist has its regular table showing how property prices world wide have developed:
Graph from this week’s Economist
As you’d expect, given the US sub-prime crisis, the US prices have dropped by around 5% in the last 12 months. More surprisingly, the UK prices, despite the concern in the British press about their property prices, gained by about 7%.

Meanwhile in Germany, the DAX has continued to hover at near-record levels for months and hardly a squeak has been heard in the press about the development of property prices locally, although they fell by 4% in the last year. I suppose, since the majority of Germans still rent rather than buy property (Germany has the lowest rate of home ownership in the EU - around 40%), that is not considered newsworthy.

On a related note: there is an interesting paper comparing the German and the Dutch property markets, which are surprisingly different, here (PDF file, size 124 KB).

While the New Yorker pontificates on whether more fuel-efficient cars will ever happen, and the British government appears to be about to go back on recent commitments to increase the use of renewable energy, the European Commission has published several papers and maps on their website showing how they expect the average precipitation, average temperature and crop yields in Europe to change over the rest of this century if no action is taken to reduce emissions. Things could get pretty uncomfortable in southern Europe – drier, hotter and much poorer crop yields. Additionally, around half of all plant species in Europe could be threatened with extinction if nothing is done to reduce emissions.

Europeans consistently regard the US as the biggest threat to world stability, a new poll revealed in the Financial Times today:

...Inhabitants of Spain are most concerned about the US, with 46 per cent of respondents naming America as the biggest threat.

European poll respondents – who also come from France, Germany, Italy and the UK – are increasingly concerned about China, which 19 per cent perceive as the biggest threat, up from 12 per cent last July.

Meanwhile, 17 per cent identify Iran as the biggest threat, 11 per cent Iraq and 9 per cent North Korea. Only 5 per cent single out Russia, despite increased tensions between Moscow and the west…

The BBC reports (my emphasis in the following quote):

There are calls for the European Union to ban the making of cars that can go at more than 101mph (162km/h).
The proposal comes in a report to the European Parliament on EU plans for a law to curb CO2 emissions from cars.

The proposal is from a British MEP. I think it is strange that Germany, which has a very high traffic density, doesn’t have any maximum speed limit (although in practice a large number of Autobahn kilometers do have speed restrictions: at accident blackspots, to reduce noise, because of roadworks, or sometimes simply because the road surface is falling apart). Maximum speeds, which would obviously need to be enforced, could help lower pollution.

However banning the manufacture of “high-speed cars” is hardly likely to solve any problems related to pollution.

It will simply encourage moving the production of pretty well all cars to non-EU countries (How many models produced in the EU have a top speed lower than 162 km/h? Even the cheapest Fiat Panda you can buy does 150 km/h). This is something that would probably have happened to a lesser degree anyway due to the pressures on production costs. The result will be just as many heavy, fast cars polluting Europe and an accelerated movement of manufacturing jobs away from the EU.