Eurovision is in Belgrade this year. Beo Grad, the white city of Serbia! Where the Danube meets, you know, some other river!
Pretty cool, no? It will be the first Eurovision in the former Yugoslavia. (Yes, there was a Eurovision in Yugoslavia in 1989. But it wasn’t former then. Doesn’t [...]

In honor of the wedding…

Kind of unfair she’s usually “former model Carla Bruni”.

I read about as much in 2007 as I did in 2006, but I wrote far fewer reviews. One of the perils of full-time employment. It also looks like a year of consolidation, rather than a year of discovery. Having polished off the lucky thirteenth in Lemony Snicket’s set in December 2006, I reached the [...]

It’s become a routine part of any foreign trip President Sarkozy takes that he announces the sale of a nuclear power station. On his recent visit to the Middle East, for example, the two keynote announcements from his meetings with the leaders of the UAE involved a) the sale of a nuclear power station and [...]

Early 2004 photos emerged in the media showing Iraqi prisoners allegedly being abused and tortured by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq. The impact was devastating and the Bush administration, already under fire by critics for the way it handled the Iraq war, was faced with yet another serious public relations [...]

OK, so Denmark’s conservatives are delighted; they won a snap election convincingly. But they are now faced with a probby; a new party has appeared on the scene, and they are considering the desirability of forming a coalition with it.
However, it’s headed by a Palestinian refugee; as the BBC says, a coalition with their far-right [...]

Well, that was interesting:
SANTIAGO: Spain’s king Juan Carlos I told Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to “just shut up,” bringing an Ibero-American summit to end in spectacular fashion on Saturday.
Spain’s monarch stormed out just before the scheduled end of the forum, visibly furious at Chavez’s description of his former PM as a “fascist” and for [...]

Has the British tabloid press reached peak rant? Like “peak oil”. The Sun this week claimed that “the Prime Minister turned the Lisbon banquet into a sordid Last Supper for Britain as an independent sovereign country”. Whoo! Some supper. More than ever before, the entire tone of the debate about Europe in the UK seems [...]

We’ve been tracking the US hard-right’s increasing take-over of British Eurosceptic rhetoric for some time; first it was Tom Tancredo who thinks there’s a secret plot to replace the dollar with the “Amero”, now it’s Ron Paul who’s scared of the “North American Union”. The major difference is that he makes an explicit link:
“The world’s [...]

As soon as I have some time I shall write a follow-up to Ingrid Robeyns’ post at Crooked Timber on the current political crisis in Belgium and talk a bit about the importance of the Dutch language to Flemish native speakers of Dutch. I am still looking for the right angle to the story and [...]