I’ve been surprised at the lack of uproar over the discovery that the CIA has been data mining SWIFT transfer archives. I suppose it’s because this is far from the first troubling secret breech of the right to privacy by the Bush administration, and most people - the ones that don’t have large sums [...]

A few months back, I picked up, on a lark, a short French novel called Allah Superstar authored by the pseudonymous Y.B. (generally known to be Yassir Benmiloud, columnist for the Algerian daily El Watan). I bought it entirely on the basis of the excerpt on the back cover:
Une fatwa, voilà ce qu’il [...]

Wisely, most European governments that were opposed to the war in Iraq have constrained themselves since it has become evident that the fall of Saddam’s statue in April 2003 and the American crash course in Democracy has not (visibly) helped to speed up the region’s modernization or led to a self-reinforcing trend of ethnic accomodation [...]

The Netherlands is talking about sending an additional 1,200 troops to Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province. The Dutch already have 540 people working in Afghanistan under the umbrella of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) peace mission and another 674 under the umbrella of Operation Enduring Freedom. For other Dutch international deployments look here.
Why is it hard [...]

Not as much as you might think, argues The Economist in a long, Christmas-special piece about French anti-Americanism (article freely available to non-subscribers) :
In one 2004 poll, 72% of the French had a favourable view of Americans, more even than in Britain (62%) or Spain (47%). Some 68% of those questioned in another poll [...]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single quotation on the cover of a book is not a reliable guide to its contents.

Read more… or Read more right here… »

Nevertheless, when the quotation clearly [...]

I’m going to barf if one more person writes that “multiculturalism” has somehow contributed to the riots in France. How exactly you square “multiculturalism” with France’s ban on the headscarf – and the fact that French is, officially, about as un-multicultural as you can get – is beyond me.
If you ask me, I’d hazard [...]

Billmon, in a very eloquent post, says nothing. All he does is put up a series of quotations. Yet his message couldn’t be clearer; or more correct.
Lest visiting American wingnuts misunderstand me: I do not assert that Billmon is correct in inviting us to infer that Donald Rumsfeld is guilty of war crimes. That question [...]

Well, I don’t read or speak French, have probably spent less than 30 days in France in my entire life, and I don’t tend to follow French politics much. But what the heck, here I go.
Of leading French politicians, it seems Nicolas Sarkozy has actually made one of the stronger efforts to reach out [...]

Michael Moore gives us a thoughtful article about Joschka Fischer (and some priceless Fischer anecdotes) in Slate today. Before going any farther I should make clear that I refer not to the notoriously fat filmmaker but to Michael Scott Moore, an American novelist living in Berlin. Of his fatness or otherwise I am entirely ignorant.

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