Not quite those Germans.
What’s happening in Romania, then? Handelsblatt reports. It’s time to pick a president, and the Social Democratic candidate looks in a strong position - although he finished second by a few points in the first round of the French-style presidential election, he’s got promises of support from several other parties, notably the [...]

Holy smokes. What will the man do for an encore?
From the BBC:
US President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Committee said he was awarded it for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.

Reuters quotes from the citation (The Nobel servers are slammed and super-slow just at the [...]

Here’s an interesting article that I somehow missed when it came out a few months back. It’s a dialogue between Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijević (who we’ve met before) and Kosovar Albanian journalist Migjen Kelmendi.
If you’re interested in Kosovo, read the whole thing: it’s all good. But this is the bit that jumped out [...]

The Dominican Republic recognized Kosovo last week, which brings the number of recognizing countries to 62. Kosovo has been collecting recognitions at the rate of 1 or 2 per month lately — this is the tenth since the beginning of this year — and while recognition by Palau or the Comoros may not count [...]

Over at another blog, I was asked what I thought about Obama’s visit to Moscow, how it was playing in Tbilisi and what it meant for Georgia. Here are my two tetris’ worth:
Saakashvili is pleased that the only explicit area of disagreement mentioned between the US and Russia was Georgia; Obama made time in his [...]

“This is a book about Germans and Jews, about power and money. It is a book focused on Bismarck and Bleichröder, Junker and Jew, statesman and banker, collaborators for over thirty years. The setting is that of a Germany where two worlds clashed: the new world of capitalism and an earlier world with its ancient [...]

The Russian judge was unimpressed by both the technical merits and the artistic program of the UN resolution to extend the observation mission in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 0.0 all around, or Géorgie, nul point.
Since 1993, UN observers had worked both sides of the lines to keep tabs on troop movements [...]

What’s Chinese for cultural destruction?
Over the next few years, [Kashgar] city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of [the city's Old Town, a] warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.

I have just been reading Misha Glenny’s McMafia. It is excellent; an intelligent tour through the criminal landscape that emerged since the late 1980s, driven by a combination of globalisation, un-globalisation, technical change, and the usual things that fertilise big crime. We hear about the early history of the modern Russian mafia, how the UN [...]

Macedonia will hold Presidential elections this weekend. No news there. But here’s the interesting thing: recent polls suggest that an ethnic Albanian candidate, Imer Selmani, has a decent chance of making it past the first round. If so, he’d become the first ethnic Albanian to enter the runoff for Macedonia’s Presidency.
Why [...]