Osama bin Laden is still at large.
If you haven’t read 110 Stories, you should.
Last year. Edward, in 2004.

Deference outlives ideology. If the Kremlin is for it, and Washington is against it, Ortega must be in favor.
From AFP, via
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega has revived Cold War ghosts by recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, supporting Russia’s stance on the breakaway Georgian regions.
Ortega, a former Marxist guerilla leader who had close ties to the ex-Soviet [...]

It’s been a while since I mentioned it here, but I grew up in the southern part of Louisiana. Not terribly near the coast, but still way down south. Most folks have left the coastal areas now, and that’s a good thing. The next 12 to 24 hours are going to be very rough, as [...]

For a while now I’ve had a private theory about the way our world used to work. It goes like this: although communism may have been bad for the people of Russia (and of the Soviet satellite states), it did a useful job in keeping the west honest through negative example. Free speech? Yes, we [...]

The war has a retrograde feel says Charlie. I believe* it’s only the third conventional war between two countries since the Gulf war. They were far more common during the cold war era.
The other was the Ethiopia-Eritrea war**, and…Iraq. One hopes retro hasn’t become fashionable following a weakening of the international law. That would [...]

It’s hard to tell today whether the pessimism regarding the WTO talks which are supposed to conclude in Geneva tomorrow is just standard last minute brinkmanship or a sign of serious trouble.  But there is at least one strange aspect to the US position, which has been critical of China and India in the last few days.

[...]

A championship that ends in a bland 1-0 game does tend to affirm certain prejudices about this sport. And after the wild craziness of Germany-Croatia, Germany-Turkey, or Russia-Netherlands…
Oh, well, it was a fun two weeks anyhow. Congratulations to our Spanish friends!

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

Read more… or Read more right here… »

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

We’ve occasionally played with the idea of the EU as the Borg, a new kind of political entity whose chief means of power is membership in its system of technocratic cooperation. The paradigm of this is, of course, the successful absorption of the Mediterranean ex-dictatorships and the economic development of the poor periphery - not [...]

It’s not clear that there’s much useful to be blogged about from a distance on the catastrophes in China and Burma.   But one difference from the past is that the population scale of Asia relative to the rest of the world is now matched by its economic influence.  In past decades, 6 figure death tolls [...]