Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic has written a perfect little piece on Serbs and Albanians. If you have trouble understanding why everyone is being so unreasonable about this Kosovo thing, here’s a place to start.
Some excerpts and commentary below the fold.

Read more… or [...]

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of seeing Alessandro D’Alatri’s recent film La Febbre (Fever). As the reviewer says (Italian link), this is a ‘normal’ (everyday) film, not a great one, even if it does include one or two memorable moments, like the scenes shot along the river bank, [...]

…is at it again.
Gay marriage undermines marriage….okay, I admit it. I’m a cranky, stick-in-the-mud conservative who keeps making the same tired old point.
And again, he fails to provide proof, sticking instead to his familiar method of talking out of his ass.
So, once more I get to remind people that Stanley Kurtz is a quack who [...]

Today more information was released on Hans Van Themsche’s motives for the killings through his lawyer. In my previous post I asked:
Is far-right ideology, in this case Vlaams Belang, responsible for poisoning his apparently unstable mind to such an extent that it would have inevitably led to murder, just like video games or heavy [...]

I’m not sure how much this story has been covered elsewhere, but the big story in Belgium for the last couple weeks has been the murder of Joe Van Holsbeeck, a 17 year old who was killed for an MP3 player in the main hall of Brussels Central train station during rush hour.
I left for [...]

Well Romano Prodi and Silvio Berlusconi finally got to meet up in front of the TV cameras last night, even if they didn’t exactly enter into face to face combat. The poll consensus seems to be that Prodi won it on points.
The debate seems to have centred around economic themes, and Euractiv has [...]

The German newspaper whose website is now a little better organized (but no so well organized, you understand, that I can actually provide a link to the story in question) published what ought to be an interesting tale of changing tastes in toys, “Per Modellbahn aufs Abstellgleis” or, roughly, “By Model Train onto the Siding.” [...]

While the entire world is admiring Londoners for their ability to not let the terror destroy their way of life, while London mayor Ken Livingston is taking the Tube each morning, because not doing so would prove the terrorists strategy right, the British government is reinforcing its ongoing quest to get hold of as much [...]

This is a very convenient moment to put up this post. Alan Greenspan has just admitted that he’s human like the rest of us, and that he doesn’t have a very good explanation for why long-term interest rates have been falling at a time when he and his Fed colleagues have been busy raising [...]

Michael Mandel had an interesting take on the US trade deficit in Business Week earlier this month (btw: he also has a weblog).
His opinion is that the US trade deficit isn’t as big a deal as people often think. One of the reasons: that the ongoing import of human capital into the US (which of [...]