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| LETTERS FROM EUROPE | Back to >>
Europe Today |
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Letter from Paris: Is it getting easier to sack workers in France?
Letter from Paris: Is it getting easier to sack workers in France? |
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Letter from Switzerland: Skiing nation goes crazy on football
Switzerland is not normally regarded as a footballing nation; the country is usually better known for its winter sports. All that changed last night though, when Basel knocked mighty Liverpool out of the European champions league to gain a place in the last 16. Imogen Foulkes reports on the day the Swiss reached fever pitch.
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Letter from Berlin - Rob Broomby on Germany's emerging international role.
For over a half a century, the nation has defined itself in the negative, what it mustn't do, what it mustn't be. Finding a new self confidence without endangering an identity produced by that sense of humility won't be easy. |
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Letter from Paris - Branwen Jeffreys on the cyber-campaign against Jean-Marie Le Pen
As newly confident Le Pen supporters are pasting up posters on the streets, a visual riposte is being organised on the internet. Special sites are being set up to spread the word - and the images - to galvanise the vote against the extreme right. |
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Letter from Madrid - Flora Botsford on the fate of the Thyssen fortune.
The background to the story is the stuff of fairy tales: eldest son, heir to the title, fights claims of adopted younger son… No fewer than four wives fighting for the interests of their children… And for the culture-vultures, possibly the world's greatest private art collection up for grabs. |
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Letter from Vienna - Bethany Bell on Schadenfreude after the French election.
Even Austria's mild and smiling Foreign Minister, Benita Ferrero-Waldner from the conservative People's Party, has made it clear that she thinks France is getting its come-uppance. This result is a delayed lesson for the way France behaved during the EU sanctions against Austria, she told Austrian television. |
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Letter from Moscow - Steve Rosenberg on the changing relationship between Russia and Israel.
This country appears to have turned 180 degrees: today the Kremlin firmly denounces anti-semitism. Only recently President Putin received Russia's Chief Rabbi and congratulated him on the festival of Passover. Jewish life is being allowed to flourish. |
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Letter from Paris - John Laurenson on Claude Chirac's crucial but understated electoral role.
If you don't recognise her, you won't see her. But if something displeases Chirac fille, she'll whisper in an ear and the problem will be rectified quickly and without fuss. There's an iron hand in the Hermes glove. |
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Letter from Dublin -- Louise Williams on the abortion debate.
I was the same age as Anne Lovett when she died. It was 1984 and we were both fifteen-year-old schoolgirls. She died of severe haemorrhaging and exposure after giving birth alone, outdoors, near a statue of the Virgin Mary in a small Irish village. |
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Letter from Lisbon -- Alison Roberts on a territorial claim revived.
Portuguese campaigners have publicly accused Spain of hypocrisy in seeking to reclaim Gibraltar from the UK while retaining a piece of land annexed from Portugal 200 years ago. The town of Olivença -- Olivenza in Spanish -- and 600 square kilometres of surrounding territory remains in Spanish hands. |
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Letter from Budapest - Nick Thorpe on the right to say 'yes'.
A court in Romania has ruled that a couple belonging to the country's large Hungarian minority did have the right to say the magic word 'Igen' meaning 'yes' to each other, in Hungarian, at a wedding ceremony in Cluj last year. The ruling is unprecedented, but appears to be a Pyrrhic victory. |
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Letter from Frankfurt - Patrick Bartlett on the Duisenberg dilemma.
Mr Duisenberg repeatedly disputed French insinuations that the gentlemen's agreement meant he would step down this year, after the introduction of Euro notes and coins. We'll probably never know how much his decision to retire next year -- on his 68th birthday -- was motivated by the desire to cock a snook at Paris. |
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Letter from Warsaw - Dariusz Rosiak on the Polish health care scandal.
The scandal shows how slippery is the slope of corruption in the Polish health care system. Corrupted it is indeed. Even those who point out that few health care workers would go as far as speeding up a patient's death acknowledge that the system has sunk to the lowest depths. |
