The first in our series of anniversary guest posts comes from the great Praktike, who normally writes for American Footprints.
The number two man in al-Qaeda, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, made waves when he announced on August 5th via a taped statement that five members of the Egyptian Islamic Group (EIG) had joined al-Qaeda. Ominously, [...]

They had Parliamentary elections last week. Nobody much noticed, but,
1) The voting was conducted in good order and — according to international observers — was, for the most part, fair and without irregularities;
2) The opposition won a fairly clear victory; and,
3) The government promptly acknowledged the opposition victory, and is handing [...]

Well here in sunny Catalonia we don’t have a fooball team of our own right now, so maybe that’s why we chose this precise moment to hold a referendum about our future.
Now the first thing to get straight is that despite all the direst predictions, Spain is still here the morning after the big vote, [...]

There has been some cricket chirping on AFOE the past few days, so allow me to make a little bit of noise here and chase them away.
Amnesty International has a new report out, called Russian Federation - Violent racism out of control. I shall quote part of the report below the fold and ask some [...]

Sorting through some old books yesterday, I came across one from Amin Maaloof that I hadn’t looked at in years. So I dusted it off, and started thinking about this post.
The English title of the book is “In the Name of Identity“, but the French title “Les Identit?s meurtrieres” (Lethal Identities?) or the Catalan [...]

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has addressed the Ukrainian situation in a statement. He said the US does not accept the results of the election. Reuters has a summary (check the State Department website later for a full transcript):
Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday the United States did not accept the results [...]

Ok, I’m feeling in a wicked mood today, so how about something really controversial (just for a change). It’s now as near to official as we’re going to get it that Sadam Hussein wasn’t making any serious advance towards the development of WMDs.
So, this being the case, what exactly is going on in Iraq?

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As someone who lives and works in Barcelona (capital of Catalonia, and formal definition in the eyes of the local nationalists of being Catalan), it is really rather frustrating to find that about the only time we make it to the European headlines (apart, of course, from when Bar?a wants to buy some world famous [...]