The Bulgarians arrested Agim Ceku last week! But then, after a couple of days, they let him go. Serbia is upset.
Who is Agim Ceku, and why should you care?
Well, Agim Ceku is a very important Kosovar Albanian. He was an officer in the Yugoslav army and then, after 1991, he was a [...]

It’s probably getting lost with so much other news but it’s been an interesting few weeks for Belarus.  For a country that always seemed just a WMD allegation from being another axis of evil country under George Bush, perhaps the experience of more constructive interrnational relations is a bit disorienting.  Yet here we have the IMF [...]

Georg Hoffmann of PrimaKlima has turned away from climatology for a moment to carry out an interesting statistical analysis of the Iranian election results. Bizarrely, the percentage split between the incumbent and the closest rival remained entirely stable throughout the count - an R2 value of 0.999. But even more bizarrely, the lead for Ahmadinejad [...]

The Georgian opposition is generally described as a loose alliance, united mainly in their distaste for current president Mikhail Saakashvili and their somewhat greater distaste for Russian domination. In the latter they are in harmony with the vast majority of Georgians, while the former is not so clear. But they are divided on many more [...]

Usually when an IMF mission issues a departing statement, it’s along the lines of thanking everyone for their hospitality and generally sounding positive about the scope for progress even when circumstances aren’t that great  Not so the just issued statement after the latest visit to Moscow.  It quickly gets to blunt criticism of the government [...]

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 [...]

On Serbia. Or, as it was then, Yugoslavia.
The Kosovo War has been debated, God knows, enough times. Still, a couple of things. One is this interesting article from the always-worth-reading Nenad Pejic. (Favorite line: “the official speeches spend all their time remembering that Serbia was bombed but never mention why Serbia [...]

On April 9, 1989, Soviet troops put down a demonstration in Tbilisi calling for the restoration of Georgian independence. As Thomas Goltz puts it in Georgia Diary:
This time, however, the local garrison of Soviet army conscripts usually called upon to maintain order was replaced by paratroopers, and when they moved against the sea of unarmed [...]

To the National Theatre for David Hare’s one-man show on Berlin. I wasn’t at all sure what to expect, but I didn’t expect this. Quite simply, it was embarrassingly, exasperatingly awful.
Hare, in person, is a fan of the southern English amateur/eccentric shtick. He makes much play of not knowing his way around despite having [...]

Has the global financial crisis crossed yet another threshold with indications that the financing of the Euro 2012 Championship could be imperilled?  The successful joint bid of Poland and Ukraine looked on one hand like a smart move to recognize the eastern European fan bases but on the other like a gamble given all the costs [...]