07:57 – I finished the first lab session in the forgery group yesterday, on detecting alterations in documents, and started the lab session on analysis of inks by chromatography. I’ll finish that today and start on the final lab session in that group, on analysis of papers. Then it’ll be on to forensic biology.
I predicted recently that the Financial Crisis item would re-appear on the Hot Topics menu bar of The Telegraph, and a week or so ago it did. Things in euroland have been lurching from worse to horrible over the last couple of months. Merkozy is no more, with French voters electing Hollande to replace Sarkozy. Greece is in complete chaos after last week’s elections, unable to form a government. The new Greek bonds are now trading at 20%+ yields. Spain and Italy are again paying disastrously high yields on their bonds, and Spain is teetering on the edge of seeking a bailout. The German government refuses to make any further concessions, and is now saying openly that it’s time for Greece to leave the euro. I said a year ago that Europe could do nothing to prevent the collapse of the euro, and that any stopgap measures they implemented could only delay the collapse for a short time at huge expense. And that’s exactly what’s happened and what’s still happening. Two years ago, even one year ago, the EU authorities could have minimized the damage simply by admitting that the euro was a fatally-flawed idea and allowing the eurozone to break up naturally. Now they’ve dug themselves in so deep that the collapse, when it comes, is going to be catastrophic. And there’s no longer anything anyone can do to prevent that catastrophe. Expect to see yet another Greek default, probably in the next couple of months, that’ll set the row of dominoes falling one after the other. Things are going to get even uglier.