So a mob attacked the US, Croatian, Turkish and Bosnian embassies in Belgrade today. The US embassy — evacuated in advance — was looted and partially burned. The other embassies also suffered varying degrees of damage.
This came at the same time as a government-sponsored mass demonstration against Kosovo’s declaration of independence. [...]

God knows I’ve been snarky about German lefties before. Look, not everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi. Lectures are not a form of rape. Osama bin Laden is not on the side of eco-feminism. (The last one is a true story, although Austrian rather than German.) But it’s very true that the modern [...]

Over at the Small Wars Journal’s blog, they’re wondering if part of the problem in dealing with failed states, the aftermath of wars, peacekeeping and the like is that it’s nobody’s job to provide a police force, and specifically a real civilian one that does things like investigating crimes.
This was, of course, a bitter problem [...]

The US hard right is constantly telling anyone who’ll listen that France is on the brink of civil war. The latest version of this furphy is the claim that the French government has officially recognised areas of France it “doesn’t control”, that are under “sharia law.” Meant are the so-called zones urbaines sensibles, rough housing [...]

Peter Finn writes in the Washington Post that despite the Russian government’s problematic relationship with the rule of law, it has actually been quite good at complying with rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, aka Strasbourg. Of course, it would have to: Since 2002, the court has issued 362 judgements concerning Russia; 352 [...]

Today’s Le Soir is reporting on the conclusions that the Belgian parliamentary committee on intelligence services (the Comité R) seems to be coming to in its closed door hearings on the SWIFT banking information affair (see here and here). The article is in the print edition of Le Soir, and online for a fee.
According [...]

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 [...]

Good lord, this looks serious:
A dawn bomb attack devastated a major Shi’ite shrine in Iraq on Wednesday, sparking nationwide protests and sectarian reprisals against Sunni mosques despite appeals for calm from government and religious leaders. The attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest sites, provoked more violence than attacks that [...]

What is happening right now in Ceuta and Melilla is shameful, it brings no credit to any of us. The anomolous position of these two Spanish North African enclaves should have been resolved long ago. As an urgent interim measure some sort of dual-sovereignty agreement between Spain and Morocco (such as that which was [...]

A few weeks ago, if you can cast your mind back that far, the big story was apparently something to do with a country called Iraq that was trying to agree among itself on its future constitution. After multiple deadlines were breached, two of the factions in the country decided to impose the constitution on [...]