From our December 2000 issue. Prospects for a Merry Christmas in St. Peter’s Square dimmed a bit at news that Jörg Haider would be bringing the tree. A visit by the Austrian politician infamous for his praise of the Third Reich…
“ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS OUT,” reads the headline of a poster recently plastered on walls all over Rome. Another bit of demagoguery from Europe’s far right? Sure enough, at the bottom appear the name and logo of the National Alliance, largest of…
Among the many good deeds for which the Pope’s admirers praised him yesterday, on the 25th anniversary of his election, the strangest to American ears must have been his support for the European Union. Surely this titanic crusader for peace…
Euroskeptics on both sides of the Atlantic will be watching with apprehension tomorrow as the leaders of 25 nations meet in Rome to open a conference on the European constitution. Nationalists within Europe worry that the constitution will advance the…
Euroskeptics on both sides of the Atlantic will be watching with apprehension tomorrow as the leaders of 25 nations meet in Rome to open a conference on the European constitution. Nationalists within Europe worry that the constitution will advance the…
What are people thinking when they download music or movies illegally, or buy bootleg discs from sidewalk vendors? The answer is, they’re not thinking. The New York Times says 60 million have used file-sharing programs like KaZaA to rip off…
The other day an Italian asked me, flatteringly, what the world makes of Silvio Berlusconi. He clearly wanted to hear that foreigners see his country’s prime minister as a buffoon. Instead I replied that despite Berlusconi’s notorious gaffes, like his…
My career in television was brief — the length of a single conference call — but instructive. A few years back, producers of a show designed to introduce children to classic works of literature wanted some advice about Don Quixote….
Yet another poll shows that Europeans increasingly disapprove of U.S. foreign policy. Released yesterday by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Compagnia di San Paolo (in Turin, Italy), the survey says that 70 percent of Frenchmen…
Pope John Paul II this week repeated his call for the forthcoming European constitution to acknowledge Europe’s Christian heritage. Three days later, the presidents of Poland and Lithuania (two of the 10 nations entering the European Union next year) joined…