Europe is now a place where diversity is celebrated. Where it has become the cornerstone of a developing common identity. Sometimes this is hard to understand. Sometimes it is hard work. But sometimes, it just comes naturally.

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Slate has a delightful piece on the board of Black’s company, Hollinger International. It seems the directors, such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, had little serious business experience and basically rubber-stamped Black’s plans.
Daniel Gross writes, “Most of these more or less honorable folks were basically idle directors. They showed up at meetings, ate lunch, [...]

A few months ago I came across an old book that my grandmother had been left by her grandmother. Called ‘Geography for Children On A Perfectly Easy Plan’ it dates from 1856 (first printed 1848) and is a British geography school textbook, educating children on each country in the world, its inhabitants and its economy. [...]

Conrad Black - quite possibly the worst newspaper owner in the history of Canada - has agreed to resign from his chairmanship at Hollinger International, essentially ending his career as a political figure and opinion-maker. Hollinger, the owner of the Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post, used to own a number [...]

According to today’s Guardian, a recently rediscovered (and to some degree reconstructed) Aeschylus play about the Trojan War is to be performed by the Cypriot national theatre company.
Aeschylus’ take on the Trojan War took the form of a trilogy of dramas of which only Agamemnon was thought to have survived. Out of 90-some plays [...]

In the news today the Comission and Spain/Poland are still haggling over the price of the constitution. Meantime from another pole of Europe, a curious story of one young Albanian, and the struggle to assert his elementary rights in his new homeland: Greece. My feeling is that in our current preoccupations, our conception of [...]

Really, much as I would like to see a marked and rapid improvement in the democratic climate in Iraq, forgive me if I can’t help considering most of the discussion about the possibilitiesof this occuring in the near future a bit like a contemporary revamp of ‘innocents abroad’. At the end of the day [...]

From the Reuters newswire:
Man gives koi kiss of life

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A former ambulance driver has put his first aid skills to good use at a weekend birthday party by reviving [...]

Just a short line for Tobias:”God Speed Your Recovery”. We and Europe need you. BTW: doesn’t this make an even stronger case for good public transport and walking!

just a short note to let you know I will presumably not be able to write much for the next four to six weeks as I broke my [...]

You sometimes meet interesting people flying across the Atlantic, and this trip has to just about take the cake for it. On the way from Minneapolis to Amsterdam yesterday morning, my flight was carrying a group of Amish bound for Zurich.
Now, the Amish are perhaps another institution Americans are more familiar with then Europeans. [...]