It would take a stand-alone blog to track the daily utterances of George Bush but here he is in St Louis today talking about his visits to Romania –
And they had just been accepted into NATO, and the President asked me and Laura to go, and there was 225,000 people, more or less, in the town [...]

After my earlier post/can of worms on secularism I have been a bit hesitant to stir up more religious trouble. Until I saw this little beauty:
The Vatican has asked Israel to ban a gay pride parade due to take place tomorrow in Jerusalem. Thousands of gay activists are expected to march in Jerusalem even though [...]

This falls under the category “Not Europe” here at AFEM but on the internet the world is a global village and one of the voices in that village has just been silenced, albeit in his own neighbourhood, along with a few others. Mahmood from the Bahrain weblog Mahmood’s Den was presented with a site blocking [...]

I cannot recommend highly enough Ken Macleod’s post (found via Crooked Timber) on how the “socialism of fools” - Engels’ description of anti-semitism - was accompanied by a sort of “liberalism of fools”, to wit, the anti-Catholicism of the pre-WWII era. Macleod, acknowledging that anti-Catholicism is rather passé these days, wonders if hatred of [...]

The question as to whether or not Russia ” truly belongs in the prestigious Group of Eight (G-8) advanced liberal democratic market economies”, and even more to the point, whether it is in a fitting condition to take the helm in that organisation is a question which was asked by Taras [...]

Vladimir Putin, speaking in Moscow today, paid tribute to the courage of “all Europeans who resisted Nazism.” He also stated something which for my generation seems to be simply a fact: that the war?s most ?ruthless and decisive? events had unfolded within the Soviet Union, whose sacrifice of 27m citizens had underpinned the Allied [...]

It is getting colder in Kyiv, so it may not be too surprising both camps are busy fueling the flames of their conflict. In a country eagerly awaiting its Supreme Court’s decision about the validity of last week’s Presidential election, the second week of popular protests in Kyiev begins with the incumbent president Kuchma’s threat [...]

The TulipGirl quotes a letter from her friend Lena, wishing that everybody could truly understand the nature of the hope hiding behind the headlines talking about an Orange Revolution.
In (some of) Lena’s words
“Quite recently I didn’t believe that my people able to resist to violence and humiliation. 2 month ago I guessed [...]

Perhaps the most damaging effect of 9/11 and all that has followed will be its role in making divided loyalties one of the most dangerous things a person can have. From the beginning, while the ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning, any effort to hold non-trivial positions about terrorism and Islam [...]

My goodness, talking about the headscarf law has brought up some interesting discussion on the blogs. It appears that my mistake was to think that this was ever about improving the lives of Muslim girls. From the responses there is one thing that is clear - this law is about legislating conformity.
For example, [...]