Given our slightly jaundiced piece on things Anglo-German, it may be just as well that work and other nuisances kept us from joining in, but the good folks at Atlantic Review held a “blog carnival” yesterday on German-American relations.
The introduction in English is here (just ignore the juxtaposition of a tagline featuring the words “truth, [...]

Matthias Matussek, once London correspondent of Der Spiegel and now its culture editor, not to mention brother of top diplomat Thomas Matussek, has a book out. Wir Deutschen: warum die anderen uns gern haben können is meant to be a call for a renewed German patriotism and pride in culture. This would usually suggest a [...]

That’s the question on the cover of this week’s European edition of Newsweek, and it’s a good one.
The rift isn’t formal yet, as the EU will likely opt for only a face-saving partial suspension of negotiations after a deadlock on Cyprus failed to be resolved last week. But it takes no special reading between the [...]

The Canadian Globe and Mail has an article about the Dutch troops in Uruzgan (hat tip Sargasso) that really made my day. One quote, emphasis mine:
The Dutch went into Uruzgan expecting the same kind of bloody welcome that Canadians have found in Kandahar. (…) But the bloodbath never happened. This past week, the first four-month [...]

Not unlike the cold old days, the US and Russia have been at odds over the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At the recent ministerial meeting in Brussels (Belgium currently has the OSCE’s rotating chairmanship), the Russian ambassador complained about an imbalance in the Organisation’s work, specifically that too much emphasis was [...]

The scandals seem to keep coming. On the heels of news that an assistant to the former presidential candidate from the League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin, LPR) party took part in a neo-Nazi festival in the summer of 2005, come reports that parliamentarians from the Self-Defense (Samoobrona, SO) party made sex a condition [...]

According to dpa (as related on page 6 of today’s FAZ), the Russian ambassador in Serbia said that Russia would use its UN Security Council veto to put the kibosh on any UN action to recognize the independence of Kosovo. He couched his argument a tiny bit more diplomatically, in that he said Russia would [...]

Romania’s government lost its majority over the weekend. I know, it took us a little while to notice, too. In fact, our attention was called to it by the German newspaper whose web site could be better organized (page 6 of today’s edition, not on the web site apparently).
The Conservatives departed the four-party coalition, a [...]

The Litvinenko case just gets weirder, although perhaps a little simpler. Yesterday’s Observer ran a long report based on the testimony of a Russian doctoral student in London who got in touch with him whilst looking for information on Chechnya. Apparently he boasted of having not only a dossier on the Yukos case, but also [...]

At his delightful blog, Timothy Burke takes up whether qualitative research about virtual worlds is best served by the methods of anthropology or history.
Douglas Thomas just pointed out that when we talk about qualitative methods in virtual world research, we always tend to define that as ethnography, when there are other kinds of qualitative methods [...]