Liberation operates a clutch of good blogs; as well as AFOE Satin Pajama nominee Jean Quatremer’s Coulisses de Bruxelles, which everyone knows, there’s also an absolutely cracking blog on French and European national security issues.
They point out here that Slovenia, which took over as holder of the EU presidency on the 1st of January, is [...]

Ha. You thought this was an exercise in strategic trolling. Think again; the French Navy’s helicopter carrier Jeanne d’Arc pulled into New York on the 28th for a port call, and to deliver a consignment of books for schools in New Orleans. (French ones, naturally.) Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani’s primary campaign took a misstep when he [...]

Richard Corbett MEP points to a bizarre feature of British debate on Europe; there is absolutely no certainty as to how anything will be reported or received. David Miliband recently gave a speech at the College of Europe in Bruges in which he stated that it was undesirable that the EU states’ deployable armed forces [...]

“Transition to democracy” was one of the European politics geek’s terms of art ever since 1989; there’s even an AFOE category devoted to transition and accession to the EU. According to Tim Garton Ash, one of his old dissident friends kept a large file of documents under the rubric “TD”; he suggested, wisely, that it [...]

Well, sort of. Bosnia’s government is still run according to the Dayton Plan, which settled the war back in 1995. So it’s really complicated.
Short version: the representative of the Serb entity, the Republika Serbska (RS), has resigned from the Council of Ministers. The Presidency (which is really a council composed of three [...]

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 [...]

Josh Marshall, on Obama and the presidency:

Obama isn’t so much running for the nomination in the sense of reaching out and taking it. He’s trying to show us how marvelous he is (and this isn’t snark, he’s really pretty marvelous) so that Democratic voters will recognize it and give him the nomination.
But that’s not how [...]

This will be of interest to UK residents (and it’s worth noting that every resident, documented or otherwise, has access to an MP). I hope everyone else won’t mind my cross-posting it from www.perfect.co.uk.
Iraqis who have worked for the British Army - as translators, typically, but also in other roles - are likely to lose [...]

Well this is a rather frivolous post about a fairly serious issue. Has anyone seen Trichet? (No, not Kelly, Trichet). I imagine the financial markets would like to know what he thinks. Or rather, maybe they wouldn’t, but they need to.
Basically this isn’t a case of quietly fiddling while Rome burns (and Q2 GDP, and [...]

Spent a weekend in Nagorno-Karabakh last month.
If you don’t know what or where Nagorno-Karabakh is… well, that’s healthy and normal. Most people don’t. But it’s pretty interesting, in a depressing sort of way.
When the Soviet Union broke up, it left a number of unresolved ethnic and territorial conflicts around its old frontiers. [...]