Jamie Kenny and Nosemonkey wonder why Labour is pro-EU. Enlarging on this post a little, I think it’s worth looking at some data. I suspect the data support that post. For example, despite all the bashing, a solid majority supports EU membership and has done consistently over time.
Further, the public does not worry very much [...]

Despite having read mountains (appropriately) of reporting on the Turkish-Kurdish-Iraqi crisis, I haven’t read anyone who has tried to answer the big question - why do the PKK seem to be doing everything possible to provoke the Turks into invading Iraq after them?
You’d think this was a pretty vital issue; who wants to be blitzed, [...]

Ezra Klein is having a bit of fun with Rudy Giuliani’s assertion that the U.S. “will be to the left of France” if the American electorate is “not careful” and doesn’t elect him:
We could elect Dennis Kucinich and 10 more Democratic senators and we wouldn’t get anywhere near France. France is a country where the [...]

Has the British tabloid press reached peak rant? Like “peak oil”. The Sun this week claimed that “the Prime Minister turned the Lisbon banquet into a sordid Last Supper for Britain as an independent sovereign country”. Whoo! Some supper. More than ever before, the entire tone of the debate about Europe in the UK seems [...]

Jean Quatremer claims that the exit polls are showing the Civic Forum 10 points ahead of the Kaczynski Kidz; which could mean a knockout win.
More, as they say, as we get it.
Update, 2351GMT: Hell yeah. Jaroslaw Kaczynski has admitted defeat; Civic Forum coming in with a wet sail. As mentioned in comments, an unexpectedly large [...]

Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic has written a perfect little piece on Serbs and Albanians. If you have trouble understanding why everyone is being so unreasonable about this Kosovo thing, here’s a place to start.
Some excerpts and commentary below the fold.

Read more… or [...]

One of the things that’s generally known about Germany, but not often spoken about for various reasons(1), is how much continuity there was between the Third Reich and the early days of the Federal Republic. A certain degree of continuity is inevtiable any time a government changes; even the Bolsheviks brought back a lot of [...]

Josh Marshall, on Obama and the presidency:

Obama isn’t so much running for the nomination in the sense of reaching out and taking it. He’s trying to show us how marvelous he is (and this isn’t snark, he’s really pretty marvelous) so that Democratic voters will recognize it and give him the nomination.
But that’s not how [...]

It’s a year since the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, and it ain’t getting any better. We’ve had the beginning of a trial; a trial where the prosecutor arrested a gaggle of secret police agents, which might have been a good sign, and proceeded to explain that despite this it was all the fault of “a [...]

We’ve been tracking the US hard-right’s increasing take-over of British Eurosceptic rhetoric for some time; first it was Tom Tancredo who thinks there’s a secret plot to replace the dollar with the “Amero”, now it’s Ron Paul who’s scared of the “North American Union”. The major difference is that he makes an explicit link:
“The world’s [...]