Given that this is a blog about EU-US issues, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sad, sad tears that are being shed today over Barack Obama’s decision to ditch the planned EU-US summit in Madrid in May.

Spain appears to be livid about it, while papers across Europe seem to be responding not in anger but rather in a rather depressed and humiliated shrug. The White House announced yesterday that Obama would not be attending the planned joint summit, which apparently came as quite a shock to its organisers. Apparently EU officials found out about the decision, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, through the news media.

Spain, which currently holds the rotating EU ministerial presidency (not to be confused with the newly-created council presidency), is now saying it will postpone the summit until the president can attend. Holding it without him would be humiliating for Europe and would lack symbolic significance.

The UK has been in frenetic anticipation this week of Tony Blair’s long-anticipated testimony tomorrow in front of the Iraq War show trial, er I mean, inquiry. The British media has been baying for a dramatic finale to the three week grilling of former cabinet officials who made the decision to join the war, which so far has failed to deliver the “smoking gun” of conspiracy they’ve wanted. My inbox this week has been flooded with emails from activists and NGOs demanding this or that question be asked of Blair. Anticipation is so high that Channel 4 News actually spent 15 minutes last night doing a staged enactment of how the proceeding might go on Friday.

But despite the high theatre that will surround tomorrow’s testimony, the fact is this is all a rather silly side show. Given that the panel focused so relentlessly on the accomplice rather than the perpetrator of the Iraq War, did anyone really expect this to reveal anything illuminating? One could have expected similar results if after World War II the allies had held an inquest with the Austrian government to “unearth the truth” about the invasion of Poland.

The British public has been demanding an inquest into why Britain went to war in Iraq for some time. At first it was supposed to be conducted behind closed doors, but Gordon Brown bowed to intense public pressure last year and agreed to have it be televised. Day after day this month the morning papers have recounted the various uninteresting details unearthed by the panel. This or that lawyer thought the war was illegal, this or that minister knew the war would be a disaster. But the big fish all along has been Tony Blair, and the public wants blood.

In the wake of Tuesday’s game-changing Republican victory in Massachusetts I’ve been inundated with expressions of bafflement from perplexed Europeans. How is it, they ask incredulously, that one year after Barack Obama came into office on a wave of popular euphoria, he has somehow come to attract the rage of the very Americans he’s been trying to help. So for my European readers, I’ll make an attempt to explain what’s going on – particularly in light of that fact that I’ve seen some pretty inept analysis from the British media over the past two days.

The answer lies in this not-often-observed reality: despite the fact that voters banished them from the leadership of every branch of government in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the Republicans have been able to wage one of the most successful oppositions in American history since Obama’s inauguration. Though the Grand Old Party is in the midst of a leadership vacuum and has given up on coming up with any actual policy ideas, it’s somehow managed to stymie the Obama agenda to such a degree that in practice they are practically a co-equal power in government. You’ve got to hand it to them, it’s truly a remarkable feat. They’ve managed to get the American public demanding a return to the party of George W. Bush.

Over the years, Americans have gotten used to bible-beating politicians eventually being exposed as adulterers, prostitute-visitors or gay toilet sexers. It’s become such a regular occurrence that people hardly bat an eyelash anymore when they see that a conservative politician went from blasting gays by day to schtupping prostitutes by night. But in Northern Ireland this week the usual ‘moralising politician exposed for moral failings’ storyline has been given a new twist. This time, the offending politician is a lady!

This could just be the first time a prominent anti-gay female politician has been caught having an extra-marital affair. It's at least the only instance that I'm aware of. It's a proud day for feminism when women can stand toe-to-toe with them men in the area of hypocritical bigotry.

Granted, the charges of hypocrisy against the rabidly homophobic and self-described “born-again Christian” MP Iris Robinson, caught in an extramarital affair with a 19-year-old boy, is not the most consequential aspect of the scandal unfolding in Northern Ireland right now. In fact, events in the north have been turning quite serious, and could lead to a collapse of the uneasy peace that has existed there for over a decade. The Protestant Unionist politician’s sexual indiscretions may not have just been hypocritical, they could have set off a chain reaction that could lead to a return of the violence that plagued the 1990’s.

European health ministers are set to hold an emergency inquiry into whether pharmaceutical companies influenced government decisions to purchase vast stockpiles of unnecessary swine flu vaccines. The inquiry comes as European governments have announced they are being forced to sell the millions of excess doses they ordered from the companies during the height of the Swine Flu Panic.

This week Gerrmany, France and the Netherlands announced they would sell the excess H1N1 drug supplies they purchased. The revelations about how much those governments spent on the vaccine has caused a public outcry, particularly in France. The country had placed orders to spend €869 million on 94 million vaccine doses, even though the population of France is 65 million. Only 5 million French people have been vaccinated. On Monday the country announced it wanted to cancel 50 million of those orders. The UK is also in talks to cancel orders for an estimated 20 million doses of vaccine, though the government won’t reveal the total size of what it ordered.

After seeing his house surrounded by a torch-wielding mob, Iceland’s president yesterday vetoed a parliament bill that would have committed the country to paying back the €3.8 billion of British and Dutch citizens’ money it lost. The bold move triggered a shock wave of recrimination across the world: the country’s debt was instantly downgraded to junk status, the IMF hinted it may withhold the $2.1 billion it loaned the country in November and the UK threatened to veto Iceland’s bid to join the EU.

So now who’s going to make the incredibly difficult and complicated decision on whether or not to pay back the ‘other people’s money’ Iceland lost? Joe Q. Public, that’s who. The issue will now go to a public referendum on 20 February.

I’ve just touched down in London after a whirlwind tour through the US, and I think I’ll be happy to not see another plane again for a long while. Flying back from Chicago to London I could already see the effects of the attempted Christmas terrorist bombing – what looked like full cavity searches for every person coming into the US. And from what I read this morning it sounds like we’ll all be shooting naked videos of ourselves at Heathrow within a few weeks time. Welcome to the new age of air travel.

I flew Air Canada back and forth to the US, despite major misgivings given their abysmal reputation for delays. My initial reluctance proved well founded. Out of four flight legs each was delayed by at least two hours. I say this after every time I fly them but this time I mean it – never again!

So, was Copenhagen a failure or not? It would appear the answer depends on which side of the Atlantic you’re on when you ask the question.

The Copenhagen Accord, finalised after hours of intensive negotiations, theoretically recognises a goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius, but contains no targets to achieve that. There are no specific emission reduction actions by developing countries and no specific commitments on long term financing for mitigation and adaptation efforts. Not only is it non-binding, the agreement wasn’t even adopted by all UN countries. Instead it has just been 'noted', which means that countries recognise its existence but don’t necessarily agree with it.

European NGOs and governments were united in their condemnation of the Copenhagen climate summit’s result this weekend, which failed to include any kind of binding agreement and was only able to muster an optional “accord”. Though the language the political leaders were using was obviously more diplomatic than that being used by the climate activists (Greenpeace’s director called Copenhagen a “crime scene”), the basic message is still the same: the summit failed. Swedish prime minister Frederik Reinfeldt, still holding the EU presidency, said the agreement, “will not solve the climate pressures, the climate threat to mankind.” Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said, "The level of ambition is not what we were hoping for." The British leadership has been railing against the Chinese all weekend, pointing the finger of blame squarely in their court. Brown said that they were, "clinging to their version of what an international organisation should not do,” and British environment minister Ed Milliband delivered the extraordinary charge today that the Chinese hijacked the summit. If there is a mainstream European publication that did not use the word ‘failure’ today to describe the summit, I am not aware of it.

If you buy a new PC in Europe next year, you’re going to see an unfamiliar little pop-up window the first time you boot up, asking you which internet browser you would like to set as the default. Believe it or not, that pop-up is the result of a bitter ten-year legal battle that was finally resolved this week.

The EU has been involved in anti-trust charges against Microsoft for years, alleging that the company has operated as a monopoly in various ways. It was the weak regulatory system in the United States that allowed this to happen in the first place, but over the last decade the EU’s competition regulator has become increasingly assertive, and today it is widely acknowledged as the world’s regulatory body.

This specific dispute centred on the fact that since the vast majority of PCs use the windows operating system, the vast majority of computer users were using internet explorer as their web browser simply because it was presented as the only option with the system – even though it isn’t. IE is used by about 56% of internet traffic. This issue is just one of many complaints against Microsoft launched by the EU. Microsoft has paid €1.7 billion in fines to the EU so far.