Osama bin Laden’s new taped message has been getting a lot of airplay. I can’t quite see why. The only thing I find interesting about it is that he sent it to Al-Arabiya as well as Al-Jazeera, suggesting that he’s broadening his media channel. The idea that he had any intent or [...]

Quand Jimmy dit what’d I say?
I love you baby!
C’est comme qui dirait
Toute la province qui chante en anglais
Brussels’ newspaper of record, the centre-right Le Soir, is running a series of articles in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of rock. Among other things, they’ve published lists of their choices for the best rock albums ever, [...]

Randy MacDonald has dropped a line pointing to an excellent and well-researched post on the demographics of Islam in France. You can read it at his livejournal site. In particular, he does something interesting in this debate - actually goes to INSEE (the French census and statistics office) and gets figures. I [...]

A number of blogs - enough that I doubt that I need to link to them - are trying to modify the top result of Google searches for the word Jew by pointing to the relevant entry in Wikipedia rather than the previous top response, an anti-semitic website which we will not be linking to.
I [...]

I have not had a lot of blogging time lately, as a check of the archives will reveal. Since taking the King’s coin to do translation research, I’ve been waist-deep in the ugly, practical, code-in-the-compiler end of algorithmic information theory. What I had taken to be a very clean and simple application of [...]

Daniel Davies has the last word on Spanish “appeasement” of terrorists.

Yesterday was regional elections day in France. France has not traditionally had any strong local government structure - one of the first acts of the revolution was the abolition of the old provinces and their replacement with purely administrative “departments.” However, the last 20 years have seen radical changes in the way French [...]

AP is running a report that Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, will withdraw Polish troops from Iraq.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a key Washington ally, said Thursday he may withdraw troops early from Iraq and that Poland was “misled” about the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
His remarks to a small group of European reporters were [...]

The great leftist protest movements of the past have often involved a certain questionable division of labour. The workers march and the academics think. Well, I guess France has always been a bit different.
First, Les Inrockuptibles circulates an Appel contre la guerre ? l’intelligence (Petition against the war on intelligence), accusing [...]

My goodness, talking about the headscarf law has brought up some interesting discussion on the blogs. It appears that my mistake was to think that this was ever about improving the lives of Muslim girls. From the responses there is one thing that is clear - this law is about legislating conformity.
For example, [...]