A German court ruled Wednesday that a soldier, who refused to follow orders because he did not want to support the US-led war in Iraq, had every right to do so.

Judges at Germany’s Federal Administrative Court said that members of the military could not be forced to comply with orders that go against their conscience.

The court added that the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of conscience also applied to soldiers in active service.

The British government has ordered the army onto the streets to join an all-out summer campaign against anti-social drunken and violent behavior by rowdy youths.

Military police and ordinary uniformed soldiers will help keep youngsters under control in up to 20 towns and cities near military barracks.

The strategy comes as police forces in more than 230 towns and cities begin a clampdown on disorderly behavior by alcohol-fueled youngsters, in response to a Home Office survey showing a disturbing rise in youth crime.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke asked the Ministry of Defense to support police forces around the country after an experiment in the town of Royston in Hertfordshire, where uniformed Redcaps — military police — were deployed to crack down on late-night violence by drunken youths.

Their patrols were judged a success and the Redcaps are now seen regularly on the streets, alongside Hertfordshire beat police, in the small market town, where local officers have welcomed them.

One officer said that although the military police are armed only with a baton similar to that used by ordinary police, their uniforms and military training deter antics from getting out of hand.

Scary.

Tim Worstall doesn’t like it either:

No, I don’t think that a few squddies harrassing the drunks on a Saturday night is a great breach of our liberties, no, it isn’t the beginnings of the fascist state…..but that is what it looks like.

Red lace for men, and it’s called “a very masculine piece of underwear“.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is usually fairly level-headed when she writes for NRO. But she thinks it is time we make up with the French because the overwhelming majority shot down the aristocrat’s European Constitution, so clearly the French aren’t all bad:

In the French vote, which the Associated Press called “a knockout blow” for the E.U. constitution — you can see a clear split. A split between the French people and French president Jacques Chirac. Between the French people and Dominique de Villepin, who, for the heck of it, we’ll call the enemy of the people. (Surely you remember his role as the leading anti-Americanist stationed at the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war.)

The problem with this view is that although the French did the right thing, they did it for all the wrong reasons. They did not vote against a bureaucracy-laden document, they voted against a free market for goods. They did not vote against paying outrageous salaries to parasitic officials, they voted against allowing workers from Eastern Europe to compete in their job pool because those workers will work for less pay.

There was nothing even remotely American-valued about the French vote, except for the incidental fact that it was a spit in the eye of Jacques Chirac and his cronies.

MartiniPundit says:

You know what? Until they reject Chirac and his ilk at the polls, Wisconsin will still get my business.

I say, you know what? Until they get a serious attitude adjustment, I (and most Americans) will go on giving my business to California, Australia, Chile and Italy and the French can tear up every vineyard in France.

The battle between Blair and Chirac escalates:

Jack Straw launched a withering assault on President Jacques Chirac and his allies last night, saying they were “deluded” if they thought that Britain’s £3 billion budget rebate was the real problem facing Europe.

The Foreign Secretary flew into Luxembourg for a meeting of European foreign ministers, vowing to tell them that plans to increase overall EU spending – while leaving French farm subsidies untouched – were “unfair”, and “wasteful”. …

Officials said [Prime Minister Tony Blair] was ready for a fight with Mr Chirac, the French president, over the rebate. They indicated that Mr Blair is prepared to plunge Europe into financial turmoil by threatening to wield his national veto over the next EU budget at a summit in Brussels this week.

The Nee Movement grows:

Yet even here in the Grand Duchy, the tiny country which by some yardsticks has done better out of the European Union than any other, polls show opposition to the constitution rising fast.

A Luxembourg No in its July 10 referendum would be a humiliation for the European project that would end all talk of keeping the document alive through the ballot box.

The latest wine industry research reveals that the global consumption of wine continues to grow with more expensive wines expanding their market. In the U.S., wine is eroding beer’s market share, even in the face of increased beer consumption.

One would think that this would be very good news in France, who has had a lock on the wine industry for centuries with everything from the best techniques to the highest snob appeal.

But one would be wrong because France is actually paying farmers to rip thier vines out of the ground and abandon winemaking altogether:

France’s top wine-growing regions are to rip up some 18,000 hectares of prestige vines in the biggest purge of the country’s wine industry since the Phylloxera epidemic a century ago.

Faced with over-production and crumbling export sales, Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Loire valley are to slash output by paying farmers a lump sum to abandon their vineyards.

Ouch!

Let’s take a look at the top 25 brands that are increasing their U.S. market:

The lone French winery that is actually expanding market share in the booming American wine market barely makes the list and is topped by Australia (repeatedly), Germany (will the French ever be able to beat the Germans at anything?), Italy and even Chile. Once again, ouch!

The French blame their failure on everything from changing tastes in wine to “vino-terrorists” (I’m not making that up). What is obvious is that the French cannot compete in a free market with stiff competition. (To be fair, the French don’t think so either, as indicated by their rejection of the European Constitution over fears of open markets and cheap labor from less developed EU nations.)

But one wonders how much politics plays in the choosing of wines and if the French, by obstructing the spread of freedom around the world, have killed the icon industry of France.

BTW, Yellow Tail winery has a blog. It also tops the list. Coincidence?

EU Referendum gives us A dictionary for EU commissioners.

The Dutch are no more comfortable with the massive amount of verbiage that is the EU Constitution than the French are. Preliminary results indicate that the Dutch turned in a landslide “NO!” with 62% voting against it.

Ratification requires approval by the governments of all 25 members, but it is doubtful that both France and the Netherlands will vote to ratify after their population has resoundingly voted against it in referendums. Furthermore, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw is indicating that the U.K. may not even hold a referendum at all:

“The verdict of these (Dutch and French) referendums now raises profound questions for all of us about the future direction of Europe,” Straw said in a statement which closely resembled comments made on Sunday after France voted “No”.

He called for a period of reflection and said an EU summit later this month would provide an opportunity to debate the issues.

Meanwhile, the dollar surged in spite of higher oil prices and the Euro sank to an eight-month low:

Charles Stanley analyst Stuart Thomson reckoned the euro’s demise was “inevitable” by 2020 and added that there was a greater than even chance that at least one country will break away from the currency zone by 2008.

Most observers believe the euro will survive but that it faces significant hurdles in the months ahead if confidence is to be restored. Nevertheless, the possibility of a break-up of economic and monetary union cannot be ignored.

Before the French vote, a TCS article gave three reasons that the euro-public should be skeptical. In part:

The vast majority of the European public has not read it and does not know what is in it. That has partly to do with the length of the Constitution (70,000 words) and its impenetrable language. In contrast, the U.S. Constitution is 15 times shorter and easily comprehensible. Not surprisingly, its chief architect, James Madison, believed that, “It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”

Some blogosphere reactions:

• Dutch blogger Peaktalk (ht to Instapundit):
  

  Independent MP Geert Wilders will introduce a ‘no confidence’ motion against the government tomorrow. This is not likely to succeed, but given the wafer-thin majority that the governing centre-right coalition currently has we are bound to see some political instability in the months ahead. Not good, since the opposition Labour Party is expected to do well if general elections were held today and that solidifies my argument that in the end the entire referendum saga ironically will end in a leftward drift.

• Dutch blogger Zacht Ei (ht to Peaktalk):
  

  If 85 percent of Parliament wants to support a constitution that 63 percent of the constituency rejects, it seems obvious that our representatives in the Second Chamber (our Lower House/House of Representatives) no longer represent us.

• EU Referendum:
  

  It shows the establishment… all got it wrong

• Davids Medienkritik:
  

  What’s plan B for the European constitution? I guess there’s none.

  Most likely the European bureaucratic superstate will proceed, whatever the will of the people.

• Michael J. Totten:
  

  Dutch liberals think it’s too right-wing. Dutch conservatives think it’s too left. But it can all be boiled down to one basic problem. It’s real simple: if the Eurocrats want a constitution that most Europeans can agree with, they need to make it real simple. …

  There are basic principles that the French, the Dutch, the Poles, etc. can rally around whether they’re left-wing or right-wing. Put ‘em in there. Leave everything else out and the constitution will pass.

• Right Thinking from the Left Coast:
  

  What? You mean that the people of Europe still view themselves of citizens of their own countries, with unique languages and values and cultures, and they don’t want to submit to surrendering their sovereignty to appease some kind of higher European order? Perish the thought.

• Captain’s Quarters:
  

  Conceptually, however, the EU nations have lived in a fantasy that they can meaningfully unite under one government structure while retaining their own complete and individual sovereignties — which is one of the reasons why the mind-boggling document looks the way it does. It’s a way of creating a federal government that gives the appearance of sovereignty without any nation actually giving theirs up.

  Our forefathers tried that and it failed. They didn’t have the foresight to try binding sovereign states together by means of unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies. Of course, the designers of the EU constitution had the advantage of coming after the establishment of the United Nations, and this looks like the exact same kind of abortion. In fact, that may really be the better analogy.

Next up: Luxembourg on 10 July which, according to EU Referendum, may face its own challenges as popular support wanes.

Some are predicting that the Euro will drop below a dollar in the next 18 months:

Mr Fels said the euro was “overvalued” on the basis of purchasing power, while trend growth prospects for the region were half US levels. Global risk aversion as the credit cycle turns will tend to favour the dollar as a “safe haven”.

In other Euro news, three polls show that the “No” vote is edging out the competition when it comes to upcoming referendum on the European Union constitution. It will probably come down to who can get the voters out — or does France have that silly mandatory vote thing?

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, it looks like Japan’s economy might be emerging from the doldrums:

Japan’s economics minister has said his country is “heading towards recovery” after figures showing 1.3% growth in the first quarter of 2005.