Novermber 1955:
Tired of trying to crack the problem of the informer, Gyuri settled down to think about being a streetsweeper while he gazed out of the window at the countryside that went past quite lazily despite the train’s billing as an express. The streetsweeper was a sort of cerebral chewing gum that Gyuri popped in [...]

Apparently the Northern European fondness for plain speaking is an art not full appreciated by the genocidal government in Sudan.
Jan Pronk, a Dutch national working for the United Nations in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, was declared persona non grata for writing on his weblog that Sudan’s army had suffered hundreds of casualties in fighting [...]

While we’re working on the update, our latest changes to the back end seems to have left us vulnerable to more comment spam than usual. (On the other hand, it’s become much easier to add pictures.) We’re doing our best to take out the trash, but there may be a bit more of it than [...]

Hungary, as readers of this blog well know, is struggling with a large budget deficit and a terrible balance of payments problem, which has led to a certain amount of trouble. Specifically the fighting in the streets kind. Now, the Socialist government of Ferenc Gyurcsyany came up with a simple plan to cut the deficit [...]

Bulgaria has a Presidential election this weekend. There’s no question who’s going to win, but there’s still some nail-biting suspense.
Why? Well, the current President is former Socialist Georgi Parvanov. (”Former” Socialist because the Bulgarian President must not be affiliated with any political party.) He seems to be a decent enough fellow. [...]

The intrepid Tobias Schwarz is working on an update to A Fistful of Euros. It’s great stuff, from what he’s shown us in previews, and he has been very good not only with the heavy lifting and template tweaking, he’s been very open about incorporating the odd suggestion from the rest of the crew.
It’s scheduled [...]

In honor of the Lisbon Agenda
[T]here’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you’ll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don’t do. And if you don’t make something users want, then you’re dead, whatever else you do or don’t do. So really this [...]

If you want news about nuclear tests, nonproliferation and other arms control topics from people who actually know their throw weights from a hole in the ground, go and visit the Arms Control Wonk blog. They’re low on heh-indeed, and high on things like “Cooperative Monitoring in Outer Space to Manage Crowding and Build Confidence,” [...]

The definitive(ish) review I’ve been meaning to write for months will obviously have to wait now that Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here are the AFOE talking points on Pamuk:

Read more… or Read more right here… »
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What happens in countries that fall out of the international headlines?
Two years ago this month, Ukraine was headed toward a presidential election that turned out to be much more tumultuous than anyone had expected. Anyone, that is, except the thousands of people who worked for months and years to make it a tumultuous election for [...]