Well it’s not official yet, but the first exit poll has Berlusconi trailing:
An exit poll Monday showed conservative Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi trailing center-left challenger Romano Prodi in parliamentary elections. The Nexus poll indicated that Prodi’s coalition received between 50 and 54 percent of the vote in both the upper and lower chambers of parliament, [...]

Well today is obviously immigration day, as thousands of Latinos take to the streets in the United States to demand some kind of ‘regularisation’. I have been posting on Demography Matters about the changing pattern of Latino migration in the US, and on the not entirely unrelated topic of whether it is the arrival of [...]

Who was the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany? Diagramme his family tree (paternal and maternal) back to the 14th century.
Germans have been shocked lately to discover that a lot of their schools suck.
The schools in question are typically Hauptschulen, the lowest in the tripartite German division of secondary schools (the others are [...]

Tom Spurgeon reports:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is filing an appeal of the Penguen decision that went against him; Erdogan has been extremely aggressive about using the courts against cartoonists who portray him in unflattering fashion.

The Mirror, on the latest bizarre twist of the Italian election campaign :
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi yesterday confessed to calling sex chat lines - to ask women what they thought of his policies. (…)
He called the girls to ask what they thought of him and Mr Prodi.
He told party workers at a briefing: “Seven out [...]

What to do when you haven’t finished a book but find yourself with something to say about it?
Convention dictates that one should finish a book before reviewing it (although I have my doubts about any number of published reviews), but on the other hand, The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, was published 20 years ago; [...]

Viktor and Yulia, together again.
April 6 (Bloomberg) — Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party will team up in parliament with an alliance led by former premier Yulia Timoshenko and the Socialists, said Our Ukraine spokesman Valentyn Mondrievsky.
The Regions Party, led by Viktor Yanukovych, which won the most votes in March 26 elections, will [...]

It’s time to play the Gelinsky game, in which one of Germany’s leading newspapers confirms prejudices about the United States, not by making things up, of course, but through slanted selection of stories. Here are seven headlines from Wednesday’s news flow in the US. Which two stories were chosen for Thursday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung? (Answer [...]

Before moving in to the nitty-gritty of flexicurity; what it is and whether it can work as a universal European labour market model I should take the time to thank the AFOE team for allowing me a spell as a guest-writer here at the blog in the coming two weeks. In terms of presentation my [...]

Sadly, No!: What’s The Phrase I’m Looking For?
The real concern to neocons is that the democracy in question is pro- or anti-American (or -Israel). And whatever new excuse they come up with to finesse their latest instance of double standard-bearing with regard to democracies, it will rest on the same nationalist underpinning as the Kirkpatrick [...]