Interesting. Original, in Estonian.
For months now, a dispute about the demolition of a bronze statue from the Soviet era has been raging in Tallinn. Krista Kodres takes up the cudgel for the communist regime’s cultural legacy. “Just imagine if people had pulled down the palaces of the hated Bourbons after the French Revolution, or if [...]

News from Berlin these days tends to come from the enormous parties in front of the Brandenburger Tor or in the Tiergarten. But spare a thought for a moment from whether Ghana will beat the eminently beatable Brazilian team and glance over to the Reichstag building, home of Germany’s parliament.
Today, more or less as I [...]

Can the Italians win a game without a significant boost from the referees?

So, Franz Beckenbauer, the president of the organizing comittee of the World Cup, got married yesterday with his long-time partner Heidi Burmester.
Nothing especially interesting here, except for the shocking fact that the Kaiser did not even bother to let his coworkers know beforehand about his wedding. World Cup spokesman Jens Grittner has this amazing [...]

“Berlin! Berlin! We’re going to Berlin!”
That was the big chant among the crowds at the three or four different venues where I watched parts of Germany’s victory over Sweden today. And, you know, they might well be.
Downtown Munich is one big party zone right now. I’ll be back, er, later.
(Sorry, David.)

I’ve been surprised at the lack of uproar over the discovery that the CIA has been data mining SWIFT transfer archives. I suppose it’s because this is far from the first troubling secret breech of the right to privacy by the Bush administration, and most people - the ones that don’t have large sums [...]

As David said, “Cool when underdogs win. Just not against us.”
(I know this happened 24 hours ago. It just took time to face up to putting it into a blog post.)

Two Serbia-related stories come together this week.
One, you may recall that I speculated about the Serbian team’s chances in the World Cup. I didn’t rate them very high. But I’ll admit I didn’t expect the famous defense to simply disintegrate. Plavi will limp away from the Cup with the worst record of [...]

Time is a fascinating concept. Today we learn that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘time’ is top noun in use terms in the English language. Interesting statistic that, especially as time is such an integral component in our decision making process.
Also in today’s news we learn from Dr. Kunio Kitamura of the Japan Family [...]

According to this morning’s news, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent had admitted the Israeli Magen David Adom and Palestinian Red Crescent Society as full members, following the final passage of a text allowing the new “red crystal” symbol. The red crystal looks to me like a red Renault logo, [...]