U- and Z-Turns Of The Day

U-Turn

From the BBC:

Telecoms giant BT is in talks with Telefonica about buying the O2 mobile network from the Spanish firm...

The irony is...

In 2002, BT spun off O2, then called BT Cellnet. In 2005 it was acquired by Spain's Telefonica for £17.7bn.

Taking irony to the next level...

[O2's] value is around half that paid by Telefonica. Deutsche Bank values O2 UK at £9bn, while UBS values it at £9.6bn.

Z-Turn

From the FT:

Germany has made a dramatic appeal to Sweden to help it out of an energy dilemma that threatens Europe’s biggest economy as it shifts away from nuclear power and fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Oops, caught with their trousers down after they overreacted to the Fukushima meltdown.

And what does the German government want 'Sweden' to do..?

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice-chancellor, warned Sweden’s new prime minister Stefan Löfven last month that there would be “serious consequences” for electricity supplies and jobs if Sweden’s state-owned utility Vattenfall ditched plans to expand two coal mines in the northeast of Germany.

I'm not sure what level of irony we're on here. Waving the Greenie flag, the Germans want to go from nuclear to renewables... but first they're taking the retrograde step back to coal, and the coal which they want to use was theirs anyway before they sold it off to foreigners.

Squaring the circle, we get this...

Angela Merkel’s cabinet is due to meet next week to discuss mothballing some coal-fired power stations as a means of helping the country reach its carbon goals.

But Berlin’s lobbying of Stockholm underlines a view held by some in the German government that coal-fired generation is vital to the security of the country’s power supply.