Interesting. Original, in Estonian.
For months now, a dispute about the demolition of a bronze statue from the Soviet era has been raging in Tallinn. Krista Kodres takes up the cudgel for the communist regime’s cultural legacy. “Just imagine if people had pulled down the palaces of the hated Bourbons after the French Revolution, or if [...]

By Craig Whitlock, of the Washington Post
Boxed away in a former Nazi SS barracks in this central German town is the core of one of the largest collections of historical documents from World War II. All told, the archive contains 50 million records that list the names of 17.5 million people, including concentration camp prisoners, [...]

From the BBC News site comes this disconcerting news:
Europe is falling behind Asia in terms of education and skills, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
It blames France and Germany which are criticised for mediocre education systems and their inherent class bias.
And further on:
“Europeans from difficult socio-economic backgrounds don’t [...]

Brighton College, a modest private school in the South of England, has announced that Mandarin Chinese is to become part of school’s core curriculum from September. Now all it needs is for the state sector to follow suit:
In a clear sign of China’s growing economic and political clout, a British school has become the [...]

Well the WHO certainly isn’t thinking of taking half measures. The debate is now surely divided between those who say ‘don’t panic’, and those who want to be able to argue ‘don’t say you weren’t warned’.
The World Health Organisation on Thursday predicted governments would need to quarantine about 120,000 people to contain an initial [...]

Well, it’s nice to know someone is thinking about us.

China’s Huawei Technologies, one of the world’s leading networking and telecommunications equipment suppliers (and big Cisco rival), has just announced that it has signed a contract with British Telecom for the deployment of its multi-service access network (MSAN) and Transmission equipment for the BT 21CN network. This seems to be an important step forward [...]

I still feel very ambivalent about Nicholas Sarkozy. Clearly France needs reform, and he seems to be the most likely politician to bring it, but some of his words and deeds worry me. His attitude towards positive discrimination as a step towards equality of opportunity for the ‘new French’ is obviously a point in his [...]

We have what appears to be the biggest outbreak yet of the avian flu in Europe in Ukraine. More than 2,000 domestic birds have died of it in a remote region of the Crimean peninsula:
President Viktor Yushchenko declared a state of emergency in five villages on Saturday after the agriculture ministry said it had identified [...]

Following up on my Euromed post on Afoe, I see McKinsey have a report of Morocco’s potential as a services outsource base for the Spanish speaking and Francophone parts of the EU (registration required, but easy and worthwhile IMHO):
Morocco’s appeal includes wages for white-collar workers that are half those in France, a relatively high proportion [...]