The Washington Post has sent a correspondent and a photographer to Finland for three weeks to “figure the place out.”
“Finland just might be the world’s most interesting country that Americans know least about. It has the best school system in the world, some of the most liberated women (the president is female), more cell phones [...]

Everybody ready for neo-con development politics?
President Bush said today he is nominating Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz to be the next president of the World Bank, tapping one of his administration’s most controversial figures as the U.S. choice to head the 184-nation institution.
Because, y’know, after engineering a military quagmire in Asia, Robert McNamara [...]

The catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean gave many of us reason to crack open the dictionary and reacquaint ourselves with the term ‘theodicy’. Crooked Timber’s Brian Weatherson, for example, saw in the catastrophe an opportunity to discuss the ‘problem of evil’ (i.e., given the manifest existence of evil in the world, is it not [...]

I was a little surprised to read in the Christmas edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (not yet online, subscription wall, in German) that Robert Mundell seems to have changed his mind. In his seminal 1961 paper about monetary integration, he famously stated that “the optimum currency area is not the world”. Now it appears [...]

It?s interesting that American conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldberg are touting the idea of making Vaclav Havel the UN Secretary General. I like the idea ? but for what I suspect are completely different reasons than the Instapundit crowd.

Read more… [...]

Well, it’s been another quiet night in Ukraine, but the demonstrations have continued again today - the live feed shows that Independence Square is full of people again with hundreds of orange flags flying.
There have been a lot of updates on Maidan overnight, mainly of protests and rallies around the world, and still the rumours [...]

One thing Victor Katolyk has said in his reports from Kiev that I’ve heard echoed elsewhere is that there have been protests - mainly by the Ukrainian diaspora - at Ukrainian embassies and consulates around the world. So, I wanted to ask the readers of AFOE to participate in a bit of interactive newsgathering. Here’s [...]

Reparlez-moi des roses de Gottingen
qui m’accompagnent
dans l’autre Allemagne
? l’heure o? colombes et vautours s’?loignent.
De quel c?t? du mur, la fronti?re vous rassure…
Tell me again about the roses in Gottingen
that come with me
into the other Germany
when the doves and vultures part ways.
From whichever side of the wall, the border comforts you…
- Patricia Kaas, D’Allemagne
Today is [...]

So it’s done. We have four more years of George W Bush to look forward to. A quick tour of the American blogs shows a few trying to pull some sort of moral victory from this election, but the truth is that they’ve lost everything. Not only has the president finally won [...]

Digital distribution changing industries? So very 1999.
Think again.

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The world of physical sales is a world of scarcity. Limited shelf space, limited distribution channels, limited display area; limits wherever [...]