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 [...]

In the night between May 6th and 7th 2006 five skinheads, coming from De Kastelein, a known extreme right café in West Flanders, beat up Raphaël Mensah, a fifty year old Parisian artist of Gabonese descent, and his thirty seven year old Belgian friend Alain Bouillon. Bouillon was heavily wounded and Mensah is now lying [...]

Just ran across this article at Radio Free Europe. Short version: Russia has decided that independence for Kosovo is probably inevitable, and has decided to milk it for maximum benefit to Russia. Putin’s saying, fine, independence for Kosovo — but then apply “universal principles”, and give independence to the Russian-supported breakaway republics of [...]

I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large - Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 - so it takes a while if you go to [...]

It seems we’re not the only ones who are beginning to see governance model incongruencies behind some of the German economic ills (see two of my last posts (1, 2), and, especially the comments to the last one).
Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell (who knows Germany well, having beeen a research fellow at the The [...]

Speaking of the Classics, I recently discovered to my shock and amazement that in Belgium, students still study Latin in secondary school. My Dutch teacher was talking about the structure of secondary school, and described how there is still a Latin/Classical Greek track, as well as a Latin/Math track that students almost have [...]

What is the value of learning a second language aside from the obvious practical benefits : the fact that you can talk to people who don’t speak your first language, can read things which have not been translated, can politely talk to people who don’t find it easy to speak your first language and can [...]

I have to confess to having had a fairly sucky 2004. Most of the causes are personal, and frankly not very interesting. But, as an example, my plan to spend the holiday season in Tunisia was abruptly cancelled because my wife got chicken pox. So, needless to say, I’ve been looking [...]

This spring, the German newspaper whose web site isn?t quite as bad as another?s began publishing a series of 50 Great Novels from the Twentieth Century. It?s an admirable project in many ways — not least a cover price of EUR 4.90 per hardback. Thirty-seven books have been published so far, and I?ve now read [...]

While we are waiting, Veronica Khokhlova offers her impressions from inside the Ukrainian Supreme Court hearing and finds the proceedings almost surreal given the atmosphere on the independence sqare - much better tv, for sure -
The judges look tired, interrupt every once in while, but let the Yushchenko’s team guy finish. Channel 5 interrupts the [...]