New Years Eve is coming.
Here in Germany, you can only buy fireworks this week — the few days between Christmas and New Years. New Years Eve is the one time it’s socially acceptable to set off fireworks. (Or so I’m told. If Germany advances in the World Cup this summer, I imagine [...]

All the major European sides are in groups where they are likely to advance. England has an interesting match against the US, but does anyone really think the English are going to fall to Algeria or Slovenia? The Netherlands, to Denmark or Japan? Italy, to Slovakia or New Zealand?
The closest thing to [...]

Looks a lot like Europe in the 2006 World Cup, actually.
Qualifiers this time: Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland. That’s almost the same list as last time. Oh, we won’t have Poland, or Croatia, and the Danes, Slovaks and Slovenes got in, but [...]

A couple of years back, I wrote an article about Kosovo’s coal industry. Short version: Kosovo has lots of coal, and most of it is middle-quality lignite. But the mines suffer from a horrible lack of investment; many of them are still using thirty to forty year old equipment. So both [...]

A sad story from the edge of Europe last week: fifteen Kosovar Albanians died trying to cross the border between Serbia and Hungary. The border there is a a river, the Tisza, which is a large and swift-flowing tributary of the Danube. The Albanians were illegal immigrants trying to move from Kosovo into [...]

A Vietnamese immigrant, brought from that war-torn country as a tiny child.
A baron, the grandson of a princess, who lives in his family’s five-hundred year old castle.
A widow who once worked for the patent office.
A paraplegic.
A huffy gay man.
A former captain of paratroopers.
A mother of seven.
They are…

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So some British think tank called the “Legatum Institute” has published an index of the best countries in which to live. Apparently they’ve been doing this every year for a while now, but it just now caught my eye.
Let me start by saying that I find this index pretty dubious. (N.B., there are [...]

Parties of the left are out of power in three of the Big Four now, and everyone expects Labour to lose the next General Election in Britain. Going down the list to the Next-Biggest Four, we have Spain (Zapatero’s center-left government hanging in there), Poland (center-right), Romania (grand coalition of the two largest parties; [...]

This seems to have gotten very little attention, but Greece changed governments last week. The ruling center-right New Democracy (ND) party called elections a couple of months ago, and the result was that — predictably — they got stomped hard.
ND had a wafer-thin majority of 152 seats out of 300; they lost [...]

Heard repeatedly yesterday: “Steinmeier has been an excellent Foreign Minister, but I just can’t stand the Social Democrats any more.”
I wonder how many portfolios our Yellow friends will get. In theory, a Conservative/Liberal, CDU/FDP government is perfectly normal. But in practice, the usual Black/Yellow government has been something like “300 Black seats, 40 [...]