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 [...]

As media furiously refrain from speculating, it’s odd to be hoping that a lightning strike, an electrical malfunction, or some combination of both was responsible for the crash of an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean last night while en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Because there aren’t a whole [...]

An unexpected consequence of the North Korean attempted satellite launch was that it has demonstrated that Russian early-warning radar coverage is poor. Specifically, the Russians didn’t detect the North Korean launch at all; they picked up the object during its suborbital flight, but not during its ascent. This is worrying, because it suggests two things [...]

The French government is moving its ministry of defence, pulling a whole gaggle of institutions together into a “French Pentagon” to be built on an old Navy site in the suburbs of Paris. Obviously there are the usual complaints, but this is interesting. Jean-Dominique Merchet’s Sécret Défense reports that they are going to knock down [...]

A handy chart in English from Dutch business newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Clickable map covers the EU-27 and includes debt, growth, unemployment, budget deficit and latest credit outlook.

What the title says.
Because we can’t all be analyzing the economic crisis. (H/T Dispatches from France.) Discoveries like this are a pleasure of cleaning up the blogroll, bit by bit.

On April 16, 1947, the SS Grandcamp exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas. The ship was carrying ammonium nitrate as part of Marshall Plan relief for post-war Europe. Ammonium nitrate is both an effective fertilizer and a potent explosive, and the Grandcamp was carrying more than 2300 tons of the substance when a [...]

German finance minister Peer Steinbrück has made some enemies lately, giving an interview in which he accused the UK of “crass Keynesianism” and complained that it had spent so many years lecturing the rest of the EU about fiscal rectitude. The last bit’s pretty cheeky from a German finance minister, after all those years of [...]

More like a bag, or indeed several.
Armed robbers pulled off one of the world’s biggest jewellery heists at a famed Paris store, making off with 85 million euros (107 million dollars) in diamonds and valuables, officials said Friday.
A gang of four thieves — two of them disguised as women — on Thursday stole nearly all [...]

The guns of Europe fell silent as the Armistice took hold.
Not everywhere, of course. Fighting continued in revolutionary Germany and Russia, in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and in other places whose history I don’t know well enough to cite here.
Death and destruction were meted out on a scale that is still [...]