Really, much as I would like to see a marked and rapid improvement in the democratic climate in Iraq, forgive me if I can’t help considering most of the discussion about the possibilitiesof this occuring in the near future a bit like a contemporary revamp of ‘innocents abroad’. At the end of the day [...]

Brad DeLong today quotes from a piece from the Wall Street Journal (the rest being locked in pay per view) about yesterday’s WTO decision to uphold its earlier finding that US steel duties of up to 30%, imposed last year to protect US steel producers restructuring, are illegal because the US never proved that their [...]

File this one under People Who Ought to Know Better. Odder than the fact of the argument is the frequency with which I see it.

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DON’T STRETCH EUROPE’S PROMISED [...]

Well, unless someone else can come up with an explanation for this article, that’s about the only explanation I can think of. I’m not sure, though, whether it’s the argument that Europeans should breed more to stop a situation where ‘Europe will either be very old or very Muslim’ or his suggestion that ‘France and [...]

I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, but it was only while talking with a colleague this afternoon, and being asked what I thought about the unwillingness of the candidate countries to reform that it came to me: with all this coming and going on the Pact, what kind of message is being [...]

Today I’m posting a link to my Singapore friend and colleague, Eddie Lee. The story behind this link is a strange one - almost surreal - and more or less directly related to my ‘friendster’ post last Saturday. I met Eddie back in February while I was Googling the net looking for some material to [...]

A few months ago on my other blog, I made a point about how the costs of multilingualism have to be set against the costs of monolingualism. It seems certain quarters of the CIA and the American Republican party agree with me, according to today’s New York Times.
C.I.A. Needs to Learn Arabic, House Committee [...]

From the Reuters newswire:
Man gives koi kiss of life

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A former ambulance driver has put his first aid skills to good use at a weekend birthday party by reviving [...]

I was thinking about writing a piece on the reports of a European Commission poll of 7,500 Europeans that says Israel is ‘the greatest threat to world peace’ but British blogger Harry Hatchet has said pretty much what I would have done, and probably much more clearly.
Innocent Israeli civilians have been murdered in discos, bars [...]

So the Dutch Finance Minister - Gerrit Zalm - has a weblog. Not understanding too much Dutch it’s hard to make a very thorough assesment, although it does look rather austere. However, unlike Howard Dean and Wes Clark, it does appear that he is posting himself. But it is not for the fact that he [...]