That’s Latin for “throw the dice high”, and that’s what it looks like Georgian leader Saakashvili has done.
I’m no longer the Fistful’s Man In the Caucasus — I left in March, after the violence in Armenia. Doug Merrill is now the go-to guy: he’s in Tbilisi, very close to the action. But he’s [...]

This one is breaking fast — as I was writing an earlier version of this post, Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili said at a press conference that Georgian forces had downed two Russian planes that had breached Georgian air space. Local media are reporting that Georgia has taken most of Tskhinvali, the breakaway region’s capital. The [...]

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn has died at age 89. Not much to add to all the obituaries, just my two kopecks’ worth that A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the most important book published between 1950 and 1975. Just when you think Solzhenitsyn is finished with his tour de force, the last sentence falls [...]

Here’s another little USA extradition headache for an eastern European country, but unlike the Serbian case where it’s a bar fight that turned out very badly, this one is a tiny little slice of the global nature of the current financial crisis.  At issue is the whereabouts of Bulgarian-born Julian Tzolov, whom federal prosecutors would [...]

Can’t find any pictures yet, but I’ve seen blogs of people coming up from Prague just to see him. That’s about a five-hour trip each way by train (no ICE connection yet). Expectations on the radio this morning were that the event would be huge.
Wish I could be there, but we’re getting packed up to [...]

Following up to my earlier post, some discussion of the international reaction to Kosovar independence.
At the moment, 43 countries have recognized Kosovo’s independence. (I’m defining “country” here as “member of the UN General Assembly. Sorry, Taiwan.) Since the UNGA has 192 members, that means that more than three quarters of the world’s [...]

Anybody who’s interested in Kosovo has long since bookmarked this incredibly useful page. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see that it lists every country that has recognized Kosovo (current tally: 43) plus the official statements of almost every country that hasn’t.
That’s plenty of fun reading by itself, but it gets even more interesting [...]

That gaggle of elite geeks who have been arguing against the horrible possibilities an internetworked world offers to fraudsters and state bullies for years have often said that one day, there’ll be a horrible crunch. A disastrous moment of truth. As Chernobyl finished the reputation of nuclear power for 20 years, the Privacy Chernobyl will [...]

As some parts of Europe prepare for Jean-Claude Juncker’s “Club of the Few” while others fall by the wayside, it’s time to look back at how we got here. Nothing unites Europeans like football, and this year’s Euro 2008 tournament is turning out to be one of the best in a long time, maybe ever. [...]

Sadly, No reads Anne Applebaum so you don’t have to. Hijinks ensue.

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Quoth Clif:
What people on the street in Poland (or elsewhere) think of Obama because he’s black isn’t [...]