Suddenly, an event manager in London is having a very bad night. Fifty sold-out shows to refund.
Just at this moment, the O2 Arena page reads, “Michael Jackson - THIS IS IT!” I bet it won’t for much longer.

If you’re a human being who speaks French, you’re more likely to be African than European. La Francophonie’s demographic center of gravity is now somewhere around Bamako, Mali.
If you’re a human being who is literate in French — say, at a high school graduate level — you’re probably European. But not [...]

Quietly clicking my way through Bloomberg last Sunday afternoon, I came across this:
Facebook Members Register Names at 550 a Second
Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking site, said members registered new user names at a rate of more than 550 a second after the company offered people the chance to claim a personalized Web address.
Facebook started [...]

I’ve been asked to crosspost this from my blog…
Resistance - The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, [...]

What’s Chinese for cultural destruction?
Over the next few years, [Kashgar] city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of [the city's Old Town, a] warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.

Why couldn’t Susan Boyle be in the Eurovision Song Contest?

Barcelona Football Club 2 - Manchester United 0
Visca El Barça! Visca Catalunya!

I have just been reading Misha Glenny’s McMafia. It is excellent; an intelligent tour through the criminal landscape that emerged since the late 1980s, driven by a combination of globalisation, un-globalisation, technical change, and the usual things that fertilise big crime. We hear about the early history of the modern Russian mafia, how the UN [...]

As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, one of the central points they made in the latest IMF World Economic Outlook was that recessions caused by financial crises tend to get resolved on the back of export-lead booms, with countries normally emerging from the crisis with a positive trade balance of over 3 percent of GDP. [...]

There’s a slightly notorious Japanese proverb: “the nail that sticks up will be hammered down”. For several weeks, M. and I have been trying to think of a British equivalent. We were both sure there must be one. Well, now we have a candidate. It’s the phrase: “he’s a bit of a loose cannon”.
Both sayings [...]