nhw: Note from Bulgarian history
How a carefully designed consociational power-sharing arrangement was subverted by a young mathematical politician.

languagehat.com: BO-VRIL.

There has been some cricket chirping on AFOE the past few days, so allow me to make a little bit of noise here and chase them away.
Amnesty International has a new report out, called Russian Federation - Violent racism out of control. I shall quote part of the report below the fold and ask some [...]

Reuters report.
Villepin, crippled by a bruising defeat over a youth job law last month, issued the latest of his almost daily denials of guilt as the murky scandal rekindled speculation about his ability to stay in office.
The so-called Clearstream affair has derailed Villepin’s efforts to press on with reforms and fuelled a resurgence of the [...]

The Comics Reporter
The Jyllands-Posten has sued attorney Michael Christiani Havemann for defamation, claiming Havemann said the paper ordered a staff cartoonist to make a more distorted drawing of the Prophet Muhammed because the cartoons they had solicited from freelancers weren’t quite provocative enough. The publication of those cartoons last September led to weeks of [...]

Differing Treatment of Religious Slurs Raises an Old Issue