Gypsies Gain a Legal Tool in Rights Fight

But now, some leaders of the Gypsies, or Roma, are looking to a new model to try to achieve equality: the civil rights struggle of black Americans. More and more, the Roma are going to court to secure their rights, and doing so where they think it will have the best chance for success — among the new East European members of the European Union and those trying to join, which are seeking to impress Western Europe with strict interpretations of their new antidiscrimination laws.

Germany and the Herero: What now? asks Ranry McDonald, guest posting on the Head Heeb.

Back on the 29th of August, The Globe of Mail of Toronto featured an article by Stephanie Nolen (”‘Forgive us our trespasses’”) that examined the contentious question of how–or even if–the Herero of Namibia should be compensated for their sufferings in the Herero Genocide of 1904-1907.

nhw: Note from Bulgarian history

How a carefully designed consociational power-sharing arrangement was subverted by a young mathematical politician.

languagehat.com: BO-VRIL.

Reuters report.

Villepin, crippled by a bruising defeat over a youth job law last month, issued the latest of his almost daily denials of guilt as the murky scandal rekindled speculation about his ability to stay in office.

The so-called Clearstream affair has derailed Villepin’s efforts to press on with reforms and fuelled a resurgence of the far-right ahead of 2007 presidential elections.

Le Monde on Wednesday published extracts from a leaked document the daily said proved Villepin knew more than he had acknowledged about an alleged dirty tricks campaign to smear Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, his rival for the presidency.

Le Monde’s article

Via Jerome, who says they ” blows open Villepin’s defense”.

The Comics Reporter

The Jyllands-Posten has sued attorney Michael Christiani Havemann for defamation, claiming Havemann said the paper ordered a staff cartoonist to make a more distorted drawing of the Prophet Muhammed because the cartoons they had solicited from freelancers weren’t quite provocative enough. The publication of those cartoons last September led to weeks of international rioting in the first few months of this year. Havemann represents 27 Muslim organizations in a defmation lawsuit against the paper, seeking $16,800 damages.

The newspaper is seeking $16,800 in damages and a court ruling that the statement was false.

Differing Treatment of Religious Slurs Raises an Old Issue

Major political scandal underway in France says Jerome.

A first scandal was started in early 2004 when a number of politicians (including Nicolas Sarkozy) and top businessmen were accused to have hidden bank accounts with Clearstream in Luxembourg. These accusations were proven to be false in early 2005 by the investigating judge, and new judicial procedures were started, by Sarkozy and others, for slander (”dénonciation calomnieuse”), to try to find out the mysterious source of the fake documents that triggered the first scandal.

Sarkozy has long suspected Chirac and Villepin to have been behind this attack on him, and today’s revelations would seem to bear this out. Villepin has already denied categorically the substance of what Le Monde prints today, but this could trigger his resignation and a government reshuffle, especially coming just after the CPE episode which has gravely weakened his authority and credibility.

- New York Times

When Microsoft and the European Commission meet next week in a Luxembourg courtroom for the latest stage of their long-running antitrust dispute, they will each argue that time has proved them right.

TNR reviews a new biography

Now Davis brings this project of twentieth-century historiography full circle: not writing the life of someone unknown who did not write, but writing the life of someone famous who wrote a great deal but not much about his own life. The challenge here is to coax biographical details out of a non-biographical text. Few are better at this than Davis. And in pursuing this project, in tackling a well-known figure about whom little is known, Davis has poured new life into an old-fashioned genre: the “Life and Work” biography re-interpreted as the “History of the Book.”

Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan was born in Granada around 1486-1488. He died, perhaps in Tunis, sometime after 1532. Between 1518 and 1527, this same person lived in Rome and went by the names Joannes Leo (Latin), Giovanni Leone (Italian), and Yuhanna al-Asad (Arabic). Posterity knows him by still another name, given posthumously: Leo Africanus, his nom de plume. But who was he? This is the puzzle facing Davis. Unlike Martin Guerre, whose story lay buried in an archive, but buried whole, the man formerly known as Leo Africanus hides in plain sight.