UFO Info Week-End

Big countries including the UK are resisting efforts to give the agency new supervisory powers over national statistical bodies

Big countries, including the UK, are resisting efforts to give the agency new, supervisory, powers over national statistical bodies.They claim that problems have only been unearthed in smaller states, such as Greece and Portugal. A decision on what to do about the Greek case is not due to be taken until the next meeting in December.Greece’s faulty figures have provoked a debate in Brussels over the power that should be given to the EU’s statistical agency, Eurostat, to check financial data declared by governments. Athens is not alone in breaking the 3 per cent rule and persistent offenders France and Germany have escaped without suffering penalties.EU finance ministers will discuss reforms to the pact at a meeting in Brussels today at which they will try to agree on the amount by which the Greek figures were inaccurate – a sum thought to be equivalent to about two percentage points of GDP per annum for four or five years. “Greece’s admission to the eurozone was done on the basis of the convergence report which was established at the time and on the basis of figures and the statistical methodology applied at that time. It wasn’t in question at that time.”The Greek financial daily Naftemboriki said the corrected deficits for the crucial period from 1997 to 1999, when the country’s economic data was scrutinised to decide on its eligibility for the eurozone, were 6.44 per cent, 4.13 per cent and 3.38 per cent respectively. Greece admitted yesterday that the budget figures it used to gain entry to the euro three years ago were fudged.

The Finance Minister, George Alogoskoufis, said the true scale of Greece’s budget deficit was massively understated enabling Athens to dip below the qualification bar and into the EU’s single currency.
“It has been proven that the deficit had not fallen below 3 per cent in every year since 1999,” Mr Alogoskoufis told reporters.The European Commission said there was no question of revisiting Greece’s eurozone membership, but the row over budget figures has dealt another severe blow to the credibility of the single currency’s battered rulebook, the Stability and Growth Pact.A Commission spokesman, Gerassimos Thomas, said there could be no going back. Earlier this month, six imprisoned former leaders urged the group’s underground leadership to abandon violence, claiming Eta had been defeated by Spanish security forces.. Prosecutors in San Sebastian said they would open an investigation into whether the rally broke a law which forbids the praising of terrorism.More than 200 members of Eta have been arrested over the past two years; its power has been diminished considerably. When he bought it in 1986, the house was haunted by a female servant who had been knifed to death on the staircase 100 years earlier. “Words,” declared George Galloway loftily yesterday as he began his much-anticipated libel action against The Daily Telegraph, “are what this case is all about”.
And during a bad-tempered cross examination over the former Labour MP’s alleged secret links with Saddam Hussein, Mr Galloway clashed with counsel for the newspaper over a number of definitions.There was the question of whether his holiday home in the Algarve was a villa or a more humble cottage, as he claimed. Then there was disagreement over whether it was a pin, or a needle upon which Mr Galloway’s case was dancing, the MP again preferring the latter.And perhaps most bruisingly – aside from acrimony over the quality and provenance of Mr Galloway’s cigars – there was the issue of whether or not the word “gravamen” (the substantial cause of an action; the most serious part of a charge) had any place in the case against the veteran anti-war campaigner.It had not, the MP insisted.Such rancour peppered an uncompromising and confrontational performance from Mr Galloway, who told the court that allegations that he was in the pay of Saddam were a “deeply wounding dagger through my political heart”. The Spanish government rejected a proposal for peace talks from Basque militants yesterday on the ground that it contained no appeal to Eta to end its campaign of violence.
Spain’s Justice Minister, Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar, insisted that negotiations with the banned party Batasuna – seen as the political wing of the armed group Eta – would be impossible until it explicitly renounced violence.”We don’t want a single word with Eta or anything in its entourage,” he said.

It’s an extraordinary array in a city that takes art as the centre of discourse and is quite happy to give New York its due as a centre of modern art in the early part of the 20th century, well before its dramatic flowering after the Second World War.New York and Modern Art – Alfred Stieglitz and His Circle (1905-1930), Mus?d’Orsay, Paris (00 33 1 40 49 48 14; ) to 16 January. But where London appears happy only if it can offer the blockbuster, Paris seems content to provide a constant flow of unashamedly intellectual shows and demonstrate how art fits in – as in, for instance, the recent exhibitions of Clowns and the Origins of Abstract Art.Go to Paris now and you can enjoy exhibitions of Pharaonic art (at the Institut du Monde Arabe), the work of the Catalan Romanesques (Mus?Cluny), Veronese Profane (Mus?du Luxembourg) and the prints and pictures of the Japanese Floating World and the Whistler, Turner and Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais (the latter is coming to Tate Britain in February). Paris, as some commentators have rather sniffily pointed out, is missing out on a number of the big exhibitions – El Greco, Raphael and Titian, to name but three. You can put it down, if you like, to a nationalist French interest in a man who did so much to promote French art and French Cubism in America. But, more important, it is an example of the didactic exhibitions that the French do so well and that London (with the exception of the Barbican and the Estorick) shies away from. But they are compulsive to viewer and photographer alike.To cap it all are the extraordinary sky and cloud photos entitled Music: A Sequence of Ten Clouds, and the studies of Lake George taken at a time when Stieglitz was clearly falling in love with the idea of nature and renewal but still framing and exposing it as if it were a painting.This exhibition at the Mus?d’Orsay is the first show in Europe to showcase Stieglitz as both patron and photographer.

They are too statuesque to be intrusive and too formal to be truly affectionate, except in some of the pictures of her face. His powerful photographs of O’Keeffe push the boundaries of both the photographic nude and portraiture almost to breaking-point. They are at once fond and ferocious, moving in from harsh and dreamy shots of her naked torso stretched like an athlete or tight like a Courbet picture, to details of her hands fondling her breasts or splayed in symbolist poise (not always successfully). There are pictures of her laughing with friends, posed against a car wheel, peeling vegetables and holding flowers. Paul Strand, profoundly influenced by Cubism, captured an angled and fractured New York, while Sheeler’s precise architectural photos, here represented by an extraordinary series of images of Shaker-like rooms and the staircase of Daylestown House, force you to look at objects almost inside out.But it is to Stieglitz’s own work that this exhibition finally returns, and rightly so.

But much less celebrated on this side of the Atlantic are John Marin, whose watercolours of marine subjects are at once forceful and fleeting; Arthur Garfield Dove, whose collages pre-date Pop Art; and Charles Demuth, an American Cubist, whose 1928 work Love, Love, Love (Homage to Gertrude Stein) could be from a contemporary art show.Stieglitz showed the same acuity in encouraging young photographers, a generosity of spirit not always shown by artists to newcomers. Camera Work went out with a bang, its final issue devoted to the young Cubist-influenced photographer Charles Sheeler. Gallery 291 shut down at about the same time.To many European visitors, at least, it is the post-war section of this exhibition that holds the real revelations. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz’s partner for three decades, is well known, and is represented here by half-a-dozen stunning abstracts.