According to today’s Haaretz, Israel has abandoned the idea of an international force in Lebanon designed to disarm Hezbollah. What they are now talking about is a 1 km wide “demilitarized zone” along the Israeli border where Hezbollah can’t deploy, enforced by Israeli artillery over the border in Israel.
Since Hezbollah’s rockets go a lot [...]

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind - Hosea 8:7
The new American-Israeli proposal for peace in Lebanon is a NATO-led force with a “strong mandate” rather than UN-led blue helmets. “NATO” in this case is a code word for European troops under effective US command, since it must be [...]

Today’s Le Soir is reporting on the conclusions that the Belgian parliamentary committee on intelligence services (the Comité R) seems to be coming to in its closed door hearings on the SWIFT banking information affair (see here and here). The article is in the print edition of Le Soir, and online for a fee.
According [...]

It seems that this morning Dutch PM Jan Peter Balkenende is visiting the Queen to signal the resignation of the cabinet. The smallest of the three parties in the centre-right government, D66 with six seats, has signaled that it would not continue to support the coalition if Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk retains her portfolio. [...]

Henry Farrell has a good piece up at Crooked Timber on the issues involved in the SWIFT data disclosure controversy. His case is that SWIFT did not, in fact do due diligence under Belgian law when it decided to give its records to the CIA. There is a precedent concerning US efforts to [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

So now, according to CNN, the US and various others are now talking about paying for an African Union peacekeeping force for Somaila. They just had some wanker on talking about how Somalia is a place where children don’t got to school, they join militias, where there’s no law and order, where “there’s been [...]

A few months back, I picked up, on a lark, a short French novel called Allah Superstar authored by the pseudonymous Y.B. (generally known to be Yassir Benmiloud, columnist for the Algerian daily El Watan). I bought it entirely on the basis of the excerpt on the back cover:
Une fatwa, voilà ce qu’il [...]

I’m not sure how much this story has been covered elsewhere, but the big story in Belgium for the last couple weeks has been the murder of Joe Van Holsbeeck, a 17 year old who was killed for an MP3 player in the main hall of Brussels Central train station during rush hour.
I left for [...]