Andrew Brown points us to an illuminating article by Bernard Nežmah on swearing in Serbian. Though the article is five years old, I daresay its theme is timeless.
According to Nežmah’s piece — published in Central Europe Review or, as we must now call it, Transitions Online — the Serbian language is blessed with a dazzling, [...]

Parts of Paris are burning. Have been for seven nights in a row. This would seem to indicate a problem, and not a small one.

If you had long suspected that under the Bush administration the CIA was running secret prisons around the world, now you know. It wasn’t just the one in Thailand, which was closed in 2003, and the annex at the tip of Cuba, closed last year.
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most [...]

Brandenburg’s Matthias Platzeck has been tapped to become new leader of the SPD. This means that Germany’s two major parties will both be led by people from the ‘new states’, the former GRD. Franz Müntefering will, however, enter the new cabinet as planned.
The CSU’s Ede Stoiber won’t be going to Prussia, though. He has decided [...]

Update (2/11/05, 01:30 CET) - Maybe Angie 2.0 is actually a guy: two East German are now heading Germany’s biggest parties. The SPD crisis management team agreed late Tuesday evening to offer Brandenburg’s state premier Matthias Platzeck (German biography) the party’s chairmanship. Absent any surprises, this nomination will probably be confirmed by the upcoming [...]