As David said, “Cool when underdogs win. Just not against us.”
(I know this happened 24 hours ago. It just took time to face up to putting it into a blog post.)

in an opening round World Cup game goes to …
Italy!
Again!
(Or is that, “as usual”?)

I don’t know if these are also soccer cliches in English, but they are widely repeated bits of wisdom in German.
First, for our friends from Japan: “The game lasts 90 minutes.” Das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten. Bayern Munich learned this most famously in 1999, when the game lasted a little bit longer.
Second, for les [...]

There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is [...]

Remember this post, about Sweden’s new year’s resolution to give up oil by 2020?
According to Jeremy Faludi at Worldchanging.com, it might not be as difficult as you think.
For example, currently, 6% of Europe’s electricity generation is from renewable sources. If they wanted it to be 100% by 2025, they should expand renewable energy generation by [...]

Well, gentle readers, here’s your occasional light Saturday post about transatlantic relations.
Should you or your children ever be interested in winning spelling bees, which, according to the Times Online, have enjoyed a recent explosion of popularity in the United States, choose words from obscure European languages, which, for some reason apparently made it into [...]

Today, when annulling the Council decision about the transger of European airline passenger name records (PNR) to the US, the European Court of Justice made an important decision, highlighting both the weakness of current privacy protection schemes and essential problems in the European institutional set up. While it is not unlikely that privacy concerns, particularly [...]

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 first banners for the coming World Cup have been hung here in Munich. The stadium that will host the opener on June 6 has been finished for more than a Bundesliga season; the autobahn enlargement is done; and I think even the renovations on the main subway station will be finished on time. Teutonic [...]

No doubt the usual suspects will be hugely enjoying the claim by Austria’s hard-right interior minister Elisabeth (Liesl) Prokop that 45 per cent of Muslims are “unwilling to integrate”. In fact, it’s more than a claim - as well as rhetoric, she’s got a “study” to support her election positioning. Unfortunately, the study still isn’t [...]