The big contemporary story now on the civil liberties front is that of the recent revelations made via the Guardian and the Washington Post about the extensive program of US Government spying, on its own citizens and those abroad, and with the cooperation of most Internet institutions such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook. An up-and-coming related issue is the anger against US authorities coming from foreign governments and institutions – such as the EU – whose citizens are being spied upon in this way. Some press reaction has been “Nothing-to-see-here-folks.” (A terrible piece, but I feel it merits being pushed forward because of the national prominence of the columnist – yes, it’s Friedman.) Other reaction has been much more worrisome (in the same NYT issue), or even manic (none of which is to say that the mania in question might not be justified).

Still, here at €S we deal (mostly) with the European press, and we like to look for the small but telling new development within the greater picture. I believe we have just that today, from the Belgian (French-speaking) paper La Libre Belgique (and just hold on for a little bit more to appreciate the irony of that daily’s name), with Talking cameras land at Charleroi.

Yes, “land” (débarquent), perhaps as if they were some sort of extraterrestrial. But that’s not as laughable as you may think, for these are indeed security cameras which have had added to them built-in loudspeakers for the watching police to use.

Use for what? To boss around the citizen whom that police-monitor has just spotted committing an infraction, that’s what, although the article prefers the tamer verb interpeller (“to speak peremptorily to”). This short piece’s final paragraph then reads, “The infractions these aim at are varied, from illegal dumping to badly-parked cars to paper discarded on the ground.”

Think of that, in light of what the US government (and soon, if not already, our own European governments) know about us and what we do. Just think about that, how far we have come and how far we apparently are going. “Badly-parked cars”; police bawling you out on the sidewalk from out of a security camera.

Yes, for now mention is only made of Charleroi, a city in southern Belgium, having this equipment installed. And that will only be at the beginning of next year. But it’s surely coming to us all, and soon, as is surely the landmark case that decides what happens to he who responds to such “peremptorily” being spoken to with nothing more than an upraised middle finger. I have abundant hope that such a case will be triggered early in this whole sad process; but I cannot offer much hope about the conclusion that will be reached.

National Press: Belgium - Wallonia (French-speaking)

Tags: Belgium, Charleroi, civil liberties, La Libre Belgique, surveillance

One surprising thing that you may not know about the recent anti-regime protests that rocked Istanbul and other Turkish cities over the past week (and which show every sign of continuing) is that the premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the main target of the demonstrators’ wrath, was not even in the country as they erupted, but rather off on a state-visit tour. But he’s back now, as of Thursday evening.

Erdogan keert strijdbaar terug in roerig Turkijehttp://t.co/vhRT2T1wqJ

June 7, 2013 1:10 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@volkskrant

De Volkskrant

Roerig: “In turmoil.” Yep, that’s the scene to which he returned. But he was strijdbaar as he did so, “combative,” boosted in his self-belief by thousands who turned out to the airport to welcome him back. He showed no indication of taking anything other than a hard line on the demonstrations, terming them mere “vandalism.”

It’s all sort of strange when you think about it, all this “vandalism” – isn’t this supposed to be about whether they tear up a park in order to make a shopping mall? In other words, isn’t this at bottom just a municipal Istanbul dispute? Why is the prime minister getting involved?

Writing in the Volkskrant, the linguist and editor-in-chief of the Dutch political magazine De Republikein Rik Smits brings up some other, more significant things you also might not be aware of concerning these Turkish troubles. The title of his piece (quotes in the original): “On Taksim Square a giga-mosque will be erected.”

Taksim Square is of course the ground-zero of the dispute, the location of Gezi Park that is in danger of being razed. The general point here is that it’s not really the supposed new shopping center that is at issue, the authorities have more far-reaching ambitions for that location – ambitions which, by the way, even if the Turkish press were aware of, it would not mention given the notorious heavy hand that the State holds above it.

Smits has not come up with anything particularly new here, it’s just a matter of going back to the historical record – in particular, back to the mid-1990s when Erdogan served as Istanbul’s mayor. Then he also had plans to have a gigantic mosque built on Taksim Square. But Turkey has always had to maintain an uneasy balance between the secular and the religious, and he did not then get his way. Indeed: the military regarded him as rather a bit too religious, and jailed him for six months. But now, of course, he is rather more powerful as Prime Minister (having already taken his revenge on the military – sorry, that’s a blog-post’s worth of material by itself).

There’s even more to it than that, though: Why this spot, why must this particular park die? Is Erdogan perchance the ultimate anti-Green? No, Smits rather shows us how Taksim Square holds a special significance, to those Turkish citizens of a secular persuasion. You have there a big monument from 1928 commemorating Turkish “independence” – in reality, its conversion from the Ottoman Empire, the work of Atatürk. Right next door is the Atatürk Cultural Center. Presumably, according to Smits’ argument, these would have to make way as well for the new mosque – the perfect symbolism of the displacement of the secular by the religious that Erdogan has allegedly been searching for since his mayoral days.

National Press: Netherlands

Tags: De Volkskrant, Gezi Park, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Taksim Square, Turkey

Hey, as the recent Boston Marathon bombings made clear, the US and Russia are both beset by more-or-less the same terrorist threats, right?* So why shouldn’t Russia gain access to the same sort of detailed incoming airline passenger data – credit card numbers, names and addresses of contacts at their incoming destination, and the like – that the American authorities now get?

Russland will Fluggastdaten aus EU-Ländern – sonst droht Moskau mit Flugverboten, schreibt Javier Cáceres http://t.co/3tIMurrKif

June 3, 2013 5:22 am via SZ AutotweedReplyRetweetFavorite

@SZ

Süddeutsche Zeitung

That’s what the Russian government is now demanding, as we learn from that tweeted article from Süddeutsche Zeitung Brussels correspondent Javier Cárceres. And it wants such access beginning 1 July.

That’s a problem though: the important thing the Americans have that the Russians don’t is a data-protection agreement they worked out prior with EU authorities, so that at least some sort of control is agreed about where such data goes on to after it is delivered. In fact, it’s illegal in the EU to provide that without a data protection agreement in place – and it’s unlikely that such an agreement can be concluded in the less than a month that remains before that 1 July deadline. (By the way, this decree from the Russian Transport Minister applies to passengers of any vehicle entering Russian territory – airplane, but also train, bus, ship.)

So now airlines that fly to or over Russia have a problem: if the decree does go through, they won’t legally be able to deliver the data the Russian authorities will be demanding to authorize their flight. But perhaps top-level EU and Russian authorities were able to make progress on this question at the EU-Russia summit that concluded yesterday (4 June) in Yekaterinburg, Russia. We’ll presumably find out soon – but don’t get your hopes up. Before being blindsided by this Russian government announcement, the EU representation had expected to go to the summit in part to discuss measures to make EU visas easier to get for Russian citizens – and vice-versa. This goal has hardly been made any easier by the Russian move.

And remember the demonstration effect, as well: an MEP is further quoted in this piece about how Qatar and Saudi Arabia are also thinking about demanding similar information about passengers coming to their lands.

* Yes, of course this assertion is ridiculous.

National Press: Germany

Tags: EU, Russia, Süddeutsche Zeitung, summit, visa

If you have been keeping track at all, then you know that tension has been high recently on the Korean peninsula. Things seemed to cool down a bit when the yearly main US – South Korean joint military exercises ended last April 30 (although an additional “river-crossing” drill was held just a few days ago – you can never get enough training!). But now there is this.

Le sort de neuf jeunes provoque des tensions avec la Corée du Nord #droitsdelhomme http://t.co/s22AvQCRCu

June 3, 2013 8:55 am via lessentiel_editorialReplyRetweetFavorite

@lessentiel

L’essentiel

Le sort de neuf jeunes: the fate of nine young people. Understandably, inmates of North Korea are trying to escape from there all the time, and what this is about is nine young people aged 14 to 18 who succeeded in getting as far away as Laos – which then promptly arrested them for illegal entry into the country and deported them back to North Korea (while arresting two South Koreans found with them and charging them with human trafficking, before releasing them to their embassy). More »

National Press: Luxembourg

Tags: L'Essentiel, Laos, North Korea, Park Gun-Hye, refugees, South Korea

Certainly you’ve heard of french fries, but how about French leave (i.e. without permission, such as from the army) or French tickler (look it up)? Courtesy of Le Monde, we find that there’s a new concept of “French shopping” arising Down Under.

En Australie, le consul français a honte de ses touristes http://t.co/ozSrjNChY4

May 30, 2013 4:16 am via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

“In Australia, the French consul is ashamed of his tourists.” So much so that this consul-general has issued an open letter pleading for better behavior, now that “French shopping” has become a by-word there for shoplifting. (Actually, the letter addresses French citizens residing permanently, asking them to set any visitors from the Home Country straight.)

The problem is a wave of French backpackers visiting Australia – 22,000 there at last count – many of whom don’t know how to behave themselves. While they are mostly there taking advantage of a one-year combined tourist/work visa that allows them to seek employment even as they explore the country, they’re also cultivating a reputation for drunken, loud behavior and, yes, petty pilfering. The low-light so far was the French guy who in January (the height of summer down there) apparently did something nasty to the Cenotaph memorial in Sydney honoring Australian war dead.

There is of course coverage of this new French plague in the Aussie papers themselves. For example, in his treatment in the Sidney Morning Herald writer Robert Upe brings forth the phrase “French nickers” – without any initial “k,” so don’t get too excited or yours in a twist, “to nick” is Commonwealth English for “to steal” (cf. US “to swipe”).

National Press: France

Tags: Australia, France, Le Monde, tourism

It’s “Europe’s greatest pain.” And finally European leaders are going to do something about it.

Arbeitslosigkeit: Der New Deal gegen die größte Pein Europas http://t.co/rSJUTZqbtY

May 29, 2013 3:58 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

The problem at issue here is youth unemployment, the solution something called the “New Deal for Europe.” Sascha Lehnartz’s on-line piece for Die Welt is topped by a self-congratulatory photo of France President Hollande shaking the hand of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (sitting down not out of disrespect, but because he is confined to a wheelchair), with related Euro-dignitaries beaming just behind.

Look closer, though: that august assemblage gathered at the famed Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) merely to start a discussion. Yes, there is some sort of intention on the part of the German and French governments to put forward a policy proposal. This is largely due to President Hollande, who at that meeting – under the motto “Europe – The Next Steps” – called for “urgent action,” considering economic growth throughout the continent averages out at present to quasi Null, i.e. basically zero. Chancellor Merkel herself and Hollande will discuss the youth unemployment issue further tomorrow (Thursday, 30 May), with a view towards presenting proposals to the EU Council meeting scheduled for 27 June, with a follow-up conference of EU labor ministers in Berlin on July 3.

So that’s about the only “substance” there is to this thing now. But no worries, they have the grandiose buzzwords already picked out.

UPDATE: Luckily, maybe all this does not matter. Yes: maybe this “youth unemployment” really just does not matter. Daniel Gros, of the Center for European Policy Studies, makes that rather iconoclastic argument here, in English.

National Press: Germany

Tags: Angela Merkel, Die Welt, EU Council, Hollande, unemployment

It’s a tough, cynical world out there, and we all know to be a bit suspicious when someone claims to be taking up a collection for a good cause, even when what’s being collected is . . . um, urine:

Farmaceutisch bedrijf misleidde zwangere vrouwen jarenlang: http://t.co/8vHmvaUbzz

May 27, 2013 4:20 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@volkskrant

De Volkskrant

Wait, what sort of pervert would be interested in other people’s urine? Turns out, when it comes from pregnant ladies its hormone content is quite valuable, and so the pharmaceutical company MSD (= Merck Sharp & Dohme, better known in the US simply as Merck*) started a “Mothers for Mothers” program in Brazil, way back in 1986, to convince expectant ladies there to contribute their precious bodily fluids on a regular basis towards a campaign to manufacture drugs designed to ease pregnancy complications.

Reasonable, right? But it has finally emerged that all these contributions (from 6,000 women at the program’s peak) were instead being diverted to produce a drug called “PG600″ used – controversially – to speed up piglet production in sows, i.e. to accelerate pork production.

The funny thing is that this “Mothers for Mothers” program was started in Brazil right after a similar campaign in the Netherlands had to be canceled in the mid-1980s, precisely because Dutch women stopped cooperating when similar misuse of their contributions came to light there. Time then to head for the Third World, to somewhere that doesn’t get news from Holland, eh? The word from this Volkskrant piece is that, according to a company spokesperson, “MSD is busy now developing a program in which women will be informed that human hormones are needed for the production of PG600.” Good luck with that.

* Company slogan (from website) = “Be well!” Perhaps something rather along the lines of “Pee well!” is in order.

National Press: Netherlands

Tags: Brazil, De Volkskrant, Merck, Netherlands, pigs, pregnancy

You would think such a question would be particularly easy for the Germans. They should even be the world’s experts in this sort of thing.

SED-Regime: Warum wir die Symbole der DDR verbieten sollten http://t.co/riAVcFhIGv

May 24, 2013 3:10 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

What do you do with the legacy of a monstrous political regime? Particularly when you represent the successor regime, which in reaction rather understandably becomes hesitant to tell people what to think? Inevitably, there are going to be some partisan holdovers, even some misguided fans from new generations that never had to live with it. (See Russia: Papa Stalin.)

Do you refrain from banning the former dictatorial party and its symbols, confident that the voting public at large will have too much sense to ever let it get close to power again? That has been the Czech Republic’s approach to its Communist Party, which after the Velvet Revolution was allowed to survive and simply renamed (rebranded?) itself the Communist Party of the Czech Lands and Moravia (KSČM – that link is to their English page). This decision has not quite redounded in an unfortunate way on the Czech political scene – by which I mean, the Communists have never been back in government – but occasionally they have come close, even though all major political parties claim that they will never work with them. (I actually treated this question of the KSČM on this site back in 2003, in a somewhat over-long post.)

Or do you say “Yes, we believe in free speech, but sometime there have to be exceptions and this is one of them”? In particular, this is what Germany – or the Germanies, both of them – did with the Nazi Party once they were allowed to regain some measure of sovereignty after World War II: no swastikas allowed, no Mein Kampf, no organization calling itself National Socialist, all under threat of real legal sanction.

Now the question has arisen with respect to the DDR, that is, the Communist and Soviet-dominated “German Democratic Republic” that was the ruling regime of East Germany from 1949 until almost a year after the Wall fell – until Reunification on 3 October, 1990. That’s what this tweet, and the Die Welt article it links to, by Richard Herzinger, is about, namely a growing consensus (at least among Germany’s ruling coalition parties, the CDU/CSU and FDP) to try to get a law passed that would similarly forbid the display of DDR symbols. More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: Berlin, CDU, DDR, Der Tagesspiegel, Die Linke, Die Welt, FDP, Ostalgie, Stasi

In this space we recently covered a new political party in Germany dedicated to discarding the euro. But what happens when the same thing happens from the other end of the EU’s economic spectrum?

#Grecia: nasce Drachma Movimento Democratico Cinque Stelle, il Beppe Grillo greco: “Basta austerità” #m5s http://t.co/fQaN9kp0XO

May 20, 2013 12:12 pm via The Huffington PostReplyRetweetFavorite

@HuffPostItalia

L’HuffPost

Yes, you see “Beppe Grillo” there in that tweet, which is written in Italian, and it’s certainly true that Grillo’s “Five Star Movement” is anti-euro. But I’m talking here about a new Greek party, one that was registered by the Athens authorities only last May 2, namely the “Drachma Five Stars Democratic Movement” which in its very name pays homage to Grillo’s Cinque Stelle (= “Five Stars”) movement.

What does this new party want? Mainly a referendum in Greece over whether to stay in the Eurozone. But it does have a formal five-point program:

1. Renunciation of the Memorandum signed with the “troika” (EU, European Central Bank, IMF) which has imposed the current austerity policy in return for financial help;
2. A return to the drachma;
3. “Self-development” (meaning unclear);
4. Social justice; and
5. National dignity.

This piece by Gabriele Vallin in the Huffington Post’s Italian edition does not indicate how much popular support this “Drachma 5-Star” party has attracted, but again, it’s brand-new. It does feature an interview with the party’s founder, Theodore Katsanevas, Professor of Labour Economics at the University of Piraeus. More »

National Press: Italy

Tags: euro, Eurozone, financial crisis, Greece, Huffington Post Italia

A brief word on Austrian politics – it’s getting slightly weird there:

Österreichs Öko-Partei: Grüne Welle (von Stephan Löwenstein, Wien) http://t.co/7RuOGcMFU2

May 15, 2013 6:42 am via FAZ.NETReplyRetweetFavorite

@FAZ_Politik

FAZ Politik

Grüne Welle: there is a new “Green Wave” in Austria, for the Green Party is doing quite well, as Stephan Löwenstein of Germany’s paper-of-record, the FAZ, lets us know. So far in 2013 there have been elections in four states – like Germany, Austria is divided into nine federal states – and the Austrian Greens made advances in each of them, spectacularly so in the state of Salzburg, where a Green party politician might even become state governor.

Maybe this isn’t so strange, you might say: the Greens have been very successful in Germany as well, just not lately. Famously, they formed a government at the national level with the Socialist SPD party of Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005 (winning re-election nationally in 2002), with party head Joschka Fischer serving as Deputy Chancellor and Foreign Minister. But Green Party success in Austria really is notable, since the political scene there is very different: basically, ever since emerging again as an independent state in 1955, Austria has been totally dominated by two parties, the socialist Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the right-wing People’s Party (ÖVP).

Yes, around 1999 you saw the rise of the right-wing xenophobic Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Jörg Haider, but intrusions into this cosy two-party arrangement of Austrian politics – for decades the basis of insider patronage for government and business positions up and down the societal spectrum – have ordinarily been very rare. Granted, the rise of the Greens is frequently manifesting itself in that party entering three-way coalitions with the established SPÖ and ÖVP parties: this is in place already in Corinthia, might happen in Salzburg, and could even happen at federal level.

Now, why does this matter? Who is interested in Austrian politics, anyway? – maybe even not many Austrians themselves! Well, it’s interesting to see the stranglehold two traditional parties have had on Austria broken up this way. This is also a step forward – if small – for those trying to do something about the worldwide threat of global warming (hey, we’re now over 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – not that there is any direct evidence that that subject is at all responsible for the Greens’ recent electoral successes).

As for more immediate concerns, Austria is firmly in the camp of northern EU “creditor” countries, in fairly good fiscal and economic shape themselves, whose attitude and generosity towards those Eurozone members struggling in the South and on the periphery (i.e. Ireland) will be decisive towards determining how – if at all – the EU can eventually emerge from its current sovereign debt crisis.

National Press: Germany

Tags: Austria, FAZ, Green Party

Zounds! When you finally get a bunch of people willing to stick their heads above the political parapet, why do people become so intent on shooting them down?

Anti-Euro-Partei: Alternative für Deutschland gerät in Turbulenzen http://t.co/ANI6ig97Dd

April 23, 2013 3:09 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

For there’s a new political party in Germany, as of a week ago last Sunday, the Alternative for Germany. Here’s a taste of their homepage, so you can see what they’re about:

Chose the Alternative!
Enough with this Euro!
The Federal Republic of Germany is stuck in the most difficult crisis in its history. The introduction of the Euro has proved itself to be a fatal mistake, that threatens the prosperity of us all.
The old parties are all crusty and worn-out. They persistently refuse to recognize and correct their mistakes.
Therefore we have founded the ALTERNATIVE FOR GERMANY!

Whether you welcome this development I suppose depends on what you think of the euro. At least it testifies to the openness of the German political scene, that a new party can be founded so easily. There are drawbacks to that as well, though, as any political scientist could tell you. Anyway, any party has to receive at least 5% of the vote in any German parliamentary election – state or federal – to get its members into that parliament. Lately it had seemed that the only new political parties being formed were from the Nazi fringe. More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: Alternative für Deutschland, Die Welt, euro, FDP, Germany, NPD

Hold on a minute, now – what is this I see?

Marathon-Tragödie: Nach Boston ist der alte Bush-Sound wieder da http://t.co/QH9MJEcmDA

April 16, 2013 8:22 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

“Marathon tragedy: After Boston the old Bush Sound is there again”! The point Torsten Krauel of Die Welt means here follows directly in his lede:

When US President Obama publicly pronounced [on yesterday's Boston Marathon double-bombing], many were reminded of his predecessor Bush twelve years ago.

What he is talking about here, apparently, is Obama’s promise “We will find who did this, and we will find out why they did this. Any responsible groups will feel the full weight of justice.” You see, it sounds just like Bush with the megaphone, standing atop the World Trade Center rubble: “We will find out who destroyed these buildings . . . and they will hear from us soon.”

This is just a terrible article, really surprising coming from what is probably Germany’s most-respected national daily – not at all a “tabloid-quality” paper in its usual incarnation, despite my headline. Where is the well-deserved contempt for George W. Bush that we were used to hearing across-the-board from the European press (with maybe some Polish exceptions)? Where is the recollection that, in fact, the 9/11 attacks came about just over a month after the CIA and FBI had their “hair on fire” over increasing indications that something big was about to happen domestically – but August, 2001 was W’s vacation month, so he couldn’t be bothered to act? No, the only proper Obama-Bush link here would have to be, if any, the bizarre time-reverse one where Bush’s 2001 performance is said to come up short compared to Obama in 2013!

You want a better assessment of George W. Bush’s legacy in reaction to the 9/11 attacks? Conveniently, that’s also available to you today on the NY Times website, although overshadowed of course by the Boston news reports: U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes.

But wait! There’s more! More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: Barack Obama, Boston, Boston Marathon, Die Welt, terrorism

If you haven’t noticed – and it’s likely you have not, attention has now moved on elsewhere – the financial task for Cyprus is now quite a bit steeper than was the case at first (that’s from the FT, so in English; free, but registration required). We had been talking about the country being asked to contribute €7 billion to get a €10 billion bailout; now the tab has risen to €13 billion for that €10 billion bailout.

Among other things, this is going to mean an even BIGGER hit to those holding accounts in excess of the €100,000 threshold at the island’s two biggest banks. Yes, many of these are Russian nationals. So that now, as Die Zeit reports, the Cypriot government has come up with a scheme to at least offer an easier path to EU citizenship for high-net-worth individuals.

The Die Zeit piece (no byline) states right off that this measure is meant as outright compensation for confiscation – i.e. for the monetary losses these people are incurring as Cyprus tries to grab the money it needs. And indeed, it further reports that President Anastasiades first announced the measure in a presentation he made yesterday before a group of Russian businessmen in Limassol (Cyprus’ second-biggest city, so filled with Russians that many just call it “Limassolgrad”!).

But does this move make sense? How receptive were those Russian businessmen likely to have been? “OK, you’ll never be able to trust our banks ever again, but do stay anyway for the sake of the nice warm Mediterranean sea-breezes and
the souvlaki!” More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: bailout, Cyprus, Die Zeit, financial crisis, Schengen

Here’s something new that any of you who might be headed to Amsterdam will want to know about! It comes originally from the website of the local radio station AmsterdamFM.nl. The news is that, as of TODAY, one of the premier French fry (friets) stands in Amsterdam, Manneken Pis, has a new sauce flavor available – in the words of owner Albert van Beek, a “new tasty sauce with the unmistakable taste of marijuana” – wiet in Dutch (one way to say it).

More good news: it’s hard to miss Manneken Pis in Amsterdam, as it is right on the Damrak (which is that big street that all the trams run down, initially with the water off to the left side, as you leave Central Station), really the very first French fry stand you will encounter as you head into town towards the Dam. Just look for the “Teasers Cafe,” with the shapely waitresses in their skimpy costumes – it’s right past that. Something to keep in mind upon your arrival, if you’re eager to try this stuff out (I’m still referring here to the wietsaus, not Teasers).

Oh, and Manneken Pis also has three stands in Utrecht – yes, they also offer this special sauce, check their webpage in the unlikely event that you’ll be in Utrecht before you find yourself in Amsterdam. (That’s not the way to proceed, folks.)

But what is it like? I now yield the floor to the 24 Oranges blog, which is where I first found out about this: “. . . it is not the easiest thing to cook with or digest for that matter. Yes, it can provide a very decent, slow buzz, thanks for asking.”

If you’re curious, EuroSavant has never smoked the stuff, does not intend to – doesn’t care whether you believe him or not! – and doesn’t even intend to try out this new wiet-sauce, but mainly because he excised French fries from his diet long ago, one gets to an age where they’re just not very healthy anymore. Then again, he often patronized Manneken Pis back when he did indulge, and understands that they regularly win national awards for the quality of their fries.

UPDATE: A confession: In the back of my mind there was always the niggling question, “Is this some kind of fraud, a set-up?” And I admit that I published first, then asked questions later, but would plead that little more can be expected in the 21st century on-line media environment.

But OK, I had the chance today (FRI. 12 APR) to go by Manneken Pis. It’s right there at the bottom of their sauces-list, in big letters: “WEEDSAUCE.” In a spirit of truth-in-advertising they add right underneath that: “Zonder THC/Without THC,” which we are all aware is marijuana’s active narcotic ingredient, and that can make you wonder whether it really can have the effect that 24 Oranges claims that it has.

National Press: Netherlands

Tags: Amsterdam, French fries, marijuana

Free public transportation: there’s a Socialist idea if ever there was one, but it’s a concept that is being tried out at an ever-expanding list of European towns. One of the latest examples – and probably most prominent, since it is after all a national capital – is in Tallinn, Estonia, where city trams and buses have been free for around three months now, as we see from Czech Business News:

V Tallinnu je MHD už čtvrt roku zdarma, město si to chválí: Estonské hlavní město Tallinn před tř… http://t.co/RxuMgp06e9 #czech #news

April 5, 2013 6:17 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@cznews

Czech Business News

Free to those registered as having a permanent residence within Tallinn, that is: not for those just visiting. So it seems you still have to check in at some ticket-punching or RFID chip-reading apparatus while boarding, it’s just that you’ll get the tickets/chip-cards you need for free if you’re a city resident. Others have to buy them – but don’t worry, you can use your regular euros to do that, Estonia has been in the Eurozone for over two years now!

(Be sure to save a 1- or 2-euro piece or two as a souvenir for the unique Estonia image on the reverse side! OK, it’s just a map of the country, but it’s different!)

As the piece reports, yearly spending on public transport amounts to around €12 million, but this scheme does tend to flush out those who can be regarded as city permanent residents – and so can otherwise be taxed – but just have not been up to now. Plus there are the other more-obvious effects: ridership up 10%, traffic on main city arteries down 15%.

As it turns out, if you’re curious about this urban experiment but don’t read Czech (or don’t want to put up with Google Translate’s version), the Washington Post recently offered its own coverage.

National Press: Czech Republic

Tags: Estonia, Novinky.cz, public transport, Tallinn

We’re now into April, the weather is finally going to start to warm up in the next few days (so they promise us – but with much rain initially), and it’s a fine April indeed to be in the Netherlands! We’ve got a big party scheduled for just next Saturday when, after a ten-year renovation, the Rijksmuseum will be reopened and will be free for everyone (for that initial day). Then there is another special party due at the end of the month. Yes, April 30 has officially been Queen’s Day for a long, long time, held to celebrate the birthday of Queen Beatrix, but this time Queen’s Day will officially and permanently turn into Kings Day as our new King, Willem-Alexander, is crowned that day in the Nieuwe Kerk on the Dam.

So what’s this discordant note that I see emanating from one of the country’s main papers?

‘Het is 2013. Hoog tijd om eens op te houden met de #monarchie‘ #vkopinie http://t.co/nibO1bH2jN

April 5, 2013 6:17 am via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@volkskrant

De Volkskrant

“It is 2013 – high time to stop with the monarchy”! Can it be that the Dutch royal house enjoys less support among its native populace than is supposed?

Probably not – but that does not mean that there is not a good case for abolition nonetheless. The tweet links to the Volkskrant article laying out the republican case by Max Westerman, a former reporter for Dutch TV, but this time all my dear readers are in luck, as that is just a translation back into Dutch of the original English piece that was published in the Wall Street Journal.

I do recomment that you take a look at the latter, if you have any interest at all in Dutch affairs. For it is certainly true that the history of the Netherlands is by far that of republicanism, i.e. of operating without a king, and it was only the European Great Powers after Napoleon’s defeat who foisted a king on the nation, and at a relatively late point in the history of kingship (1813) at that.

National Press: Netherlands

Tags: De Volkskrant, Netherlands, republicanism, Royal Family, Wall Street Journal

You’ve heard of Lenovo, right? Chinese company . . . bought IBM’s Thinkpad laptop division back in 2005 – right, that one. Ah, but you still don’t know the half of it, as reporter Henning Steier of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung found out in Beijing:

Zu Besuch bei Lenovo in Peking: Wie die Chinesen den Smartphone-Markt aufrollen wollen und warum das schwierig wird: http://t.co/s4PMencv2l

March 25, 2013 11:06 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@nzzdigital

Henning Steier

In the first place, with a 16% worldwide market-share as of QIV 2012 Lenovo is contending head-to-head with Hewlett-Packard for top position as the world’s largest personal computer-seller. Granted, that is equivalent to fighting the last war, considering that PC sales are now in steady retreat (with the new Windows 8 operating system doing little to stem the losses, as Steier mentions).

Far more impressive is what Lenovo intends to do in the area of smartphones, which these days is truly where it’s at commercially. In fact, they already sell them – maybe you’ve never heard of products such as the company’s flagship K900 smartphone (pictured), but that’s because they have mainly been active in the Chinese market (25 million sold in 2012; #2 there behind Samsung). and in other non-Western lands such as Russia, India and Indonesia (soon to include Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria).

They will be coming to the US and European smartphone markets, to be sure, by 2014 at the latest. Get ready, because their ambition is to be at least #3 in smartphones worldwide within 18 months, and they will upping their yearly production of new models from last year’s 42 to do that. There’s even a rumor that they have their sights set on acquiring the ailing Canadian firm RIM, maker of the Blackberry; CEO Yang Yuanqing seemed quite annoyed when reporters at a Beijing press conference raised that possibility.

By the way, Lenovo sells phones using Android, but with three models coming out this year that run on the Windows Phone system. It also relies to a much greater degree than most other smartphone makers on Intel chips to power its devices – it already has a solid relationship with the California-based chipmaker for its computer business.

National Press: Switzerland

Tags: Blackberry, China, Lenovo, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, smartphones

Fresh off of his convincing electoral victory last November, Barack Obama is managing to hold his own against the Republican Party in Congress in a series of government-funding-crisis confrontations. He still gets pretty good mileage from campaign-like trips out to the boondocks beyond D.C. to gather political support, buoyed by his strong poll-numbers.

But that’s within the US borders. In the Middle East, on the other hand, he’s not so popular, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung reminds us:

Im Nahen Osten ist @BarackObama unbeliebt. Trotzdem steht er jetzt in der Pflicht, einen Kompromiss auszuhandeln. http://t.co/rHg20G086l

March 20, 2013 8:40 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@SZ

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Yet that is where the President is currently off to, namely to Israel, where, as the journalist Peter Münch puts it

In the West Bank they have abused his pictures with shoes and set them on fire, in Israel a survey has shown that only 1 out of ten likes him.

Wait, doesn’t anyone remember Obama’s epic 2009 Cairo speech, reaching out to Iran and to the Arab world? Yet now he is disliked from all sides! Why is that?

Obama’s first foray into the Near East peace process failed because it was well-meant but not well-made. In the manner of an itinerant preacher he made loud promises that he could not keep, and added to them mild threats that he withdrew at the slightest resistance. This lack of consistency has exacted a bitter revenge: the region drifts towards new conflicts and the USA has lost influence there.

Yes, and there was the minor additional thing that Binyamin Netanyahu openly campaigned last year for Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney! More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel, Obama, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Onion

National Press: United Kingdom

Tags: Commonwealth, Huffington Post UK, LGBT, Queen Elizabeth II

He’s a controversial figure. He has made many a wacky pronouncement in the past. He’s the lightning-rod for most of the opprobrium that currently heads Iran’s way over its alleged plan to gain a nuclear weapons capability – even though, as most commentators seem to miss, he holds quite limited power himself, even as President of the Islamic Republic.

Still, one of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tasks in that capacity is representing Iran at public events outside the country, including most recently the funeral of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. You could well imagine that that was an occasion at which the Iranian president truly wanted to be present – not a happy one, to be sure, but one celebrating the life of another political leader with whom he often made common cause in an anti-American capacity.

So he was there, alright. But he got into trouble:

Aux funérailles de Chavez, Ahmadinejad choque les conservateurs iraniens http://t.co/FHClQpUWkh

March 11, 2013 2:58 am via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

What trouble? After all, all you can see by way of illustration if you click through to the Le Monde “Big Browser Blog” article is Mahmoud tearfully consoling some lady (who turns out to be Hugo Chávez’ mother).

But that’s just it – you don’t touch women in public if you’re a good Muslim! Indeed, some devout Muslim functionaries in the Netherlands (for example) even refuse to shake women’s hands, which can lead to awkward problems when they are supposed to meet with female cabinet ministers. So Ahmadinejad has gotten considerable push-back about this from back home, including angry denunciations from a couple members of the Iranian parliament, one of whom accused the President of “losing control” at the funeral.

The only response so far from the Ahmadinejad side is from his spokesman, who denies that the President embraced Chávez’ mother. I guess it all depends on your definition – calling Bill Clinton!

BTW to give credit where it is due, this Le Monde piece specifically credits a Le Huffington Post* article as its source. Yes, Arianna has expanded her empire there, but also to the UK (no-brainer), Italy, and Spain! Sharp-eyed EuroSavant fans will have noticed by now how I have incorporated pieces from those sources (but not the UK) into my Twitter-stream. Anyway, it says on its site that Le Huffington Post works “in association with the Le Monde Group,” so that sort of borrowing is perfectly alright.

* Special note for francophones and francophiles: Who knew that the “h” in “Huffington” would be aspirated?

National Press: France

Tags: Hugo Chavez, Iran, Islam, Le Huffington Post, Le Monde, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

You might remember that was the publicity campaign undertaken back in 2009 by the Australian state of Queensland, when it opened applications for that “best job” of working as a blogging “caretaker” of an island on the Great Barrier Reef for six months, at a hefty salary.

How hefty? Hey: 53 thousand zlotys per month!

OK, he wasn’t actually paid in zlotys, probably in Australian dollars. But that’s simply the figure given in this treatment today by the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita:

Najlepsza praca świata: Poszukiwany kandydat do opieki nad rajską wyspą w Australii. Do obowiązków należeć będ… http://t.co/Ec5dPVxkNz

March 5, 2013 9:32 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@rzeczpospolitaa

Rzeczpospolita.pl

My calculations show that that is just less than the equivalent of €13,000 per month – pretty good! But there was trouble in paradise. Agata Każmierska’s article also tells of how the winner (who beat out 34,000 other applicants), the Briton Ben Southall, was stung by a “un-large, but uncommonly dangerous jellyfish” just days before his “best job” gig was to end. As he recounted on his blog, at first he tried to tough it out with the increasingly severe symptoms he experienced – feeling light-headed, but then fever, rising blood pressure – but finally called a doctor onto the island, who saved him from a heart-attack just in time.

That Rzeczpospolita tweet actually reads like a job announcement (“Wanted: Candidate for a paradise island in Australia”), as if “The Best Job in the World” is set to go again. It’s a bit strange: Ms. Każmierska merely hints that that might be the case, and does so inaccurately, when she writes as the first sentence after her lede, “Unfortunately, the work is only for candidates from Great Britain and Ireland.”

In fact, “The Best Job in the World” is in fact on again, but for details you need to switch to a piece provided by AFP in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique. More »

National Press: Belgium - Wallonia (French-speaking), Poland

Tags: Australia, La Libre Belgique, Queensland, Rzeczpospolita

[Please note the correction added at the end of this blogpost.]

Now here’s a tweet you don’t see every day! It has to do with Václav Klaus, now the former President of the Czech Republic, but it’s not just about his departure from that office:

CN: Senát má rozhodnout, zda podá na Klause žalobu pro velezradu #klaus #senat #amnestie http://t.co/ebQLBOWPP8: http://t.co/yhHmp4QGPn

March 4, 2013 6:26 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

Velezradu: “treason.” So that’s “Senate must decide whether to charge Klaus with treason.”

“What’s that all about!” you might ask. It is a pretty poor good-bye present, don’t you think? Why couldn’t the Senate just have handed the ex-President a nice necktie, or maybe a gold pen?

But OK, this is fairly easy to explain in an American context, for those out there with long-enough memories. You might recall that the dying days of the Clinton Administration, back in early 2001, were rather by the ridiculous pardons Bill Clinton started handing out, most especially to Marc Rich, the financier who had made sure he was out of the country when he was indicted by the IRS for tax evasion.

Well, Václav Klaus did much the same thing as the end of his presidential term started to come within sight.around last New Year’s Day. He issued a wide series of pardons which mainly went – in a similar manner to Marc Rich, funnily enough – to businessmen guilty of abusing the Czech Republic’s system of “coupon privatization” for disposing of State-owned properties back in the 1990s, by “tunneling” many of those companies, i.e. systematically stealing their assets, sucking them dry, then escaping to foreign lands with well-stocked Swiss bank accounts. It’s no coincidence that by far the major actor involved in getting coupon privatization going was then-Premier Václav Klaus.

(OK, the České noviny report that you get when you click through the link in the abovre tweet also says that the Senate has also charged him with further harming the Czech national interest by refusing to sign duly-ratified laws that he didn’t like – for example, the EU’s Lisbon Treaty – and by paralyzing the country’s court system by refusing to nominate any new justices for a whole year.)

Well, it’s the justices of the Czech Republic’s Supreme Court which now get to preside over an impeachment trial:

Senát schválil ústavní žalobu na Václava Klause. Z 68 přítomných senátorů pro žalobu hlasovalo 38, proti 30.

March 4, 2013 3:57 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@iDNES_vyber

Zprávy iDNES.cz

Right, the vote among Senators was 38 in favor, 30 against. This probably isn’t about Klaus actually ever going to jail, though. Just as elsewhere, impeachment is mainly a matter of removing a sitting President who can be shown to have violated the law in a serious way. Conveniently, the Senate waited until Klaus had already left office – but he still stands to lose the payments he is still due from being President (e.g. his pension, though he has other pensions) if he is convicted.

BTW that same article has an instant mini-poll to the side showing 69% approving of the impeachment. Those numbers might change by the time you access that page later.

So Václav Klaus, second President of the Czech Republic, is not just going to fade away into the sunset; the Senate won’t let him. Things could get exciting!

P.S. Apologies that the IDNES tweet above announcing the result of the Senate impeachment vote did not have the usual link within it to allow you to go look at a Czech-language article. But let’s give IDNES (= the on-line paper of the Czech Republic’s biggest non-tabloid daily, Mladá fronta dnes) a bit of a break, they’ve had a hard time:

České zpravodajské servery čelí druhé vlně počítačových útoků. Weby iDNES.cz tak mohou být opět problematicky dostupné. Situaci řešíme.

March 4, 2013 3:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@iDNES_vyber

Zprávy iDNES.cz

That’s right, they’ve been hacked! There’s a lot of that going around among news organizations these days. Should you desire to access their website, it might not be working quite yet.

CORRECTION: Klaus has not yet left the Czech Presidency, his last day is 7 March 2013. So the Senate’s action has caught him in the last days of his term. Naturally, there is hardly enough time to resolve the treason charges during his remaining time in office, so this impeachment cannot have the effect of removing him as president.

National Press: Czech Republic

Tags: České noviny, Mladá fronta dnes, pardons, privatization, Václav Klaus

Even for people coming from neighboring countries, moving to Germany involves making some cultural adjustments, and one of the main ones involves name-titles: Germans love them! They include them in their passports, for example; they even include them in raised-letters on their credit cards. Put another way: if your German counterpart has earned one (e.g. Prof., Dr.) you better be darned sure that you use it when addressing that person orally or in writing (until you get close enough to address him/her with “Du,” if ever) – and in writing, for the case of the particularly active academic, you are expected to keep track of them all (e.g. “Dear Herr Prof. Dr. Dr. Schmidt!”).

However, there are inklings that things might be about to change:

EXKLUSIV: „Dr.“ nicht mehr im Pass: Grüne starten Angriff auf Deutschlands Elite http://t.co/w8lctH7wI1

March 4, 2013 6:31 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@handelsblatt

Handelsblatt Online

What this is about is that Germany’s Green Party has submitted to the Bundestag a proposed law that would would ban the “Dr.” title from official documents such as the passport and ID card.

Why this now? Well, the “Dr.” title has lost a bit of its luster in Germany lately due to a widely-publicized string of plagiarism scandals. First there was Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a politician of Angela Merkel’s coalition partner, the CSU, and at one time German Economics Minister (2009) and then Defense Minister (2009-2011). But then someone discovered that he had committed widespread plagiarism in writing his doctoral thesis, and soon he was out of government.

(Hey, this guy’s full name is Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg – the “zu” alone tells you he comes from a noble family. So why did he feel he needed to insist upon adding to all that with a “Dr.” in the first place?!)

That was swiftly followed by more cases of plagiarism in high places. These involved two MEPs from Germany’s Free Democratic (FDP) Party, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis (yes, of Greek descent) and Esther Silvana Koch-Mehrin. Both had their doctorates withdrawn; both, however, remain MEPs. When the same plague arrived last year at the doorstep of no less than the Federal Education Minister(!), Annette Schavan, she did – eventually – resign her position.

You could say, then, that “Dr.” is not really all that it used to be, even in Germany. Thus the Green Party initiative, but the article goes on to point out that no less an Establishment figure than current Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble suggested the same thing back in 2007, to no success.

National Press: Germany

Tags: Annette Schavan, Germany, Handelsblatt, Wolfgang Schäuble

Solar power: Sorry, but the US is not tops here, for one thing Congress is still mired in recriminations about the loan guarantees that went to the bankrupt Solyndra. As for the Chinese, they have made rather more progress, to the point of allegedly “dumping” polysilicon solar panels on the US market.

But it’s the Germans who are really into solar. They claim to be the world’s biggest solar market at present. And they have just scored a major coup, as we hear from Die Welt:

Erneuerbare Energien: Saudi-Arabien unterstützt Umsetzung von Desertec http://t.co/93C3FnEs

February 20, 2013 3:52 am via SocialFlowReplyRetweetFavorite

@welt

DIE WELT

Yes, there’s still a heck of a lot of oil in Saudi Arabia, but there is also quite a lot of sun constantly beating down on its desert sands. And the Saudi authorities are sensible enough to want to do something to exploit that. Well, that’s understating things somewhat: they want to invest $109 billion through 2032, so that by that time they want to be generating 25 gigawatts of power from solar-thermal plants, and a further 16 gigawatts from photovoltaics.

It’s a German “civil society initiative” called the Desertec Foundation (site in English) that is about to sign an agreement with the Saudi governement to be in on the ground floor of this effort, by establishing a Saudi company to be called “Desertec Power” whose mandate will be “above all planning, execution, local value-added [Wertschöpfung] and running the installations,” but also the “closely related themes of education, training and employment.”

Apparently Desertec Power will rely mainly on so-called Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology, which is not photovoltaic but rather uses parabolic mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays in salt-water tanks and thereby store the energy, so that it’s available even when the sun goes down – and also can contribute in some way to providing desalinated water, another thing the Saudis prize highly.

You can click through to peruse the photo at the top of the article if you need some idea of what CSP arrays look like. (It’s a picture of them in Spain; they’re not yet in Saudi Arabia, the contract hasn’t even been formally signed!) Here in this post I’ll give you instead the grip-&-grin photo of the two principals in this deal. And just as with a Saudi official you can expect a name along the lines of Ahmed al-Malik (whom we see to the right, in Arab garb), with Germans I’m afraid you sometimes run the risk of silly-sounding names: that’s Dr. Thiemo Gropp to the left. And Thiemo has got the desert-dollars.

National Press: Germany

Tags: Desertec, Die Welt, Germany, Saudi Arabia, solar energy

The hashtag #mintthecoin is currently white-hot in the Twitterverse. In case you’re not following the discussion, it has to do with the idea that one option President Obama has, should House Republicans be determined to deny the necessary rise in the debt ceiling so as to force the US government to default on many of its financial obligations sometime around mid-February, is to take advantage of the statute allowing the Treasury to mint platinum coins of any denomination to fashion a, say, $1 trillion coin and present it to the New York Federal Reserve to, in effect, create that money to spend.

This is the idea advanced particularly vehemently these days by Nobel Prize-winning economist and NYT blogger Paul Krugman, who notes that while it might seem a silly idea on its face, any notion that the Republicans can be persuaded to stop holding the credit-worthiness of the US Federal Government hostage is “just ridiculous – far more ridiculous than the notion of the coin.”

Some do not agree, so that a full-fledged debate on the advisability of #mintthecoin has erupted among the American punditocracy. But don’t think no one outside American borders has also noticed:

Lese: Debatte um Eine-Billion-Dollar Münze in USA geht weiter – Wirtschaft – Süddeutsche.de http://t.co/ULhPNfzu

January 9, 2013 5:53 am via HootBarReplyRetweetFavorite

@blicklog

Dirk Elsner

This includes the prominent Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, as picked up by Dirk Elsner on his @blicklog feed.

The piece, by Jannis Brühl, is entitled “Heads or Tails,” and its essential function is to describe to German readers what is going on – or, rather, just what the heck is going on over there in the USA with this crazy-sounding coin-minting plan that, as Brühl puts it, beflügelt die Phantasie – basically, is mind-blowing. More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: budget deficit, debt ceiling, Süddeutsche Zeitung, USA

You have heard of the MOOC, right? That stands for “Massive Open On-line Course,” truly the great Internet innovation of 2012. No less than on-line guru Clay Shirky has suggested that MOOCs – offered through sites such as Coursera, edX, Udacity and others, and surely more on the way – threaten to be to universities what Napster was to music.

For now, though, they simply offer fantastic (and free) on-line higher education opportunities (but beware, the required time commitment is usually considerable). Whether YOU are aware of these or not, rest assured that the Germans now are as well, after an article provocatively entitled Harvard For All appeared first in the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and then, more significantly, on the website of Germany’s leading intellectual weekly, Die Zeit. The lede:

Study for free with the country’s most famous professors: The on-line courses of the US’ elite universities makes that possible. Only who will finance this hoard?

Well, financing for now is somebody else’s problem. This should really set off the landslide (GE: Erdrutsch) of German students into these MOOCs, for their capabilities in English are often excellent. I know that Coursera courses (of which I have taken/am taking a few) routinely attract students in the tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, but I bet this article alone will be responsible for at least a couple thousand more on an ongoing basis. Then again, these MOOCs are explicitly built to scale, so that should not cause any new problems in particular – the course’s discussion forum might just be a bit more crowded with student comment and response.

Also, there have already been some MOOC efforts in Germany. This article mentions an on-line IT course now being taught for the second time by an Institute at the University of Potsdam (seems to be in German) – but also (nota bene!) the course in English on “Ideal City [sic] of the 21st Century” given by the Leuphana Digital School of the Universität Lüneberg – free, of course, unless you want a paper certificate sent to you at the end – that will begin registration in a few days on January 9. Note that taking this course will involve being assigned to a workgroup of about seven fellow-students from all over the world within which you will be expected to collaborate to complete group assignments; if those turn out to be evaluated as the best, so that your team comes in as #1 in the course, you’ll win an expenses-paid trip to Berlin to meet your fellow group members in the flesh!

Finally, Iversity is a Berlin-based start-up (subsidized by German government funding, yet its site and most of its courses are in English) making a beginning in this MOOC space while also branching out to research groups and conferences.

National Press: Germany

Tags: Die Zeit, education, Germany, MOOC

Yes, that’s the news today from France’s Le Figaro, which announces a new Bowie album, to be titled Where Are We Now?:

David Bowie revient avec un nouvel album pour mars http://t.co/wM9MtVtQ

January 8, 2013 9:31 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Le_Figaro

Le Figaro

Where indeed? Readers can click through to the article itself to ponder that question as it pertains to Ziggy Stardust himself, as the piece is topped by a revealing screen-shot of the maestro today at age 66. Other than that, there are only two further remarks that I think pertain:

• You see in the tweet, and at places in the article itself, mention of mars, but that has nothing to do with Bowie’s past obsession with the Red Planet or the spiders that might issue therefrom; it’s simply the French word for the month of March, which is when the new album is due out.
  
• What’s he doing coming out with an album (his first in ten years) anyway? There’s a persuasive argument that music albums are but things of the past.

National Press: France

Tags: David Bowie, Le Figaro, Mars

You might have heard about the recent kerfluffle involving the Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated (for Cyrano de Bergerac) French actor Gérard Depardieu. French President François Hollande recently carried out his pledge to increase the top marginal income tax rate in his country to75%, and Depardieu has become the point-man for resistance to that among the French wealthy. He has written vituperative public letters to the president, for example; but he has also asked for and received Russian citizenship (where income taxes are at only 13%, for everyone). He’s apparently good friends with Vladimir Putin, according to the French weekly L’Express (and numerous other publications):

Quand Gérard Depardieu fait la com’ de Vladimir Poutine http://t.co/5rWqHj33

January 6, 2013 11:37 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@LEXPRESS

LEXPRESS

Yes, good buddies they are, интимные приятели . . . if you click through there to the article you can see a nice photo of the two men embarking on a bear-hug. “Did you see my latest film?” Gérard asks Vladimir, “I sent it to you.” (Depardieu’s latest project was a franco-russian co-production on the life of Rasputin, in which he took up the title role.) And Brigitte Bardot is threatening to follow him to Russia, although over a dispute involving two sick elephants (I kid you not! Click thru!) rather than taxes.

But here’s the punchline to all this, beyond the patronized pachyderms, which I provide as a public service to those (very few) of you who have not already figured it out for yourselves. Russia may impose only a 13% tax-rate, but it’s really not a very nice place to go and live; Depardieu’s praise of the state of democracy there, which formed part of his open letters, only shows how ignorant he is, for Russia has no rule of law and the rich there stay that way only through Vladimir Putin’s good graces (as shown by the counter-example of former oil company CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky).

There’s yet another L’Express article of note here, entitled Russia: Depardieu among the crazies? For the spot in Russia Depardieu has picked out for himself – should he really want to spend time there – is said to be the southern Moscow suburb of Белые Столбы (“White Posts”). But as journalist Alla Chevelkina (note the name) points out, Depardieu apparently is unaware that Russia’s most famous mental institution – which in the bad old days also housed numerous Russian dissidents as part of the Soviet regime’s employment of psychiatry as a weapon against such “troublemakers” – is in the same neighborhood and shares the “White Posts” name. Or that Russians use the expression “gone to the White Posts” to denote someone who has been packed away to the crazy-house.

UPDATE: And now the newspaper Libération tells us that Depardieu was greeted as a hero upon his arrival in Russia, and offered a house and the post of Minister of Culture! The thing is, all of those have to do with the Russian Republic of Mordovia, some who’s-ever-heard-of-it place apparently located somewhere to the east of the former Stalingrad.

National Press: France

Tags: Brigitte Bardot, Gérard Depardieu, L'Express, Moscow, Putin, Russia

Geography buffs find particularly interesting places in the world where major urban centers come close together but under different jurisdictions: the greater New York City metropolis, say, or the Liège-Maastricht-Aachen area in NW Europe. But there is one other that is more interesting even than these, featuring major urban centers once divided by the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, and that is the Vienna-Bratislava area along the Danube. (Which, if you enlarge it even further, also includes the Hungarian city of Mosonmagyaróvár – OK, we’ll forget about that one for now . . .)

Indeed, a major Bratislava residential area known as Petržalka (to the south, and infamous for its very many drab panelák Communist pre-fab high-rise apartment buildings, still there today) has for years crowded right up to the line beyond which no one was allowed to be seen, lest they be shot. Ever since that regime fell in 1989, travelers heading to Bratislava on the bus from Vienna’s Schwechat airport (e.g. your humble blogger) have still found it remarkable the way the villages and fields lying to that city’s east abruptly give way to crowds of buildings once you cross the border.

But now there is no more “border” – that part of the world is now in the EU’s Schengen Area. Slovaks are no longer constrained, and so now they’re breaking out::

Novinky: Bratislavané se stěhují do Maďarska a Rakouska: http://t.co/8XyLzZ69

January 4, 2013 1:14 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

“Bratislavans are moving to Hungary and Austria,” it reads. Yes: “moving,” as in “house.” This article – and note, it’s on a Czech news website – mainly discusses Slovak settlement in two neighboring places, namely the Austrian village of Wolfsthal – which you ride through on that airport bus – and the Hungarian town of Rajka, in the other direction but still only about 20km from Bratislava.

As recently as 2007, there were only three Slovaks in Wolfsthal, out of a population of around 720; now it’s 230 Slovaks making up a population of 900. The mayor, Gerhard Schödinger, certainly speaks Slovak – he has a Slovak wife! (And he used to be an Austrian customs official, back when there was a border.) As we can see, he also makes sure that the public signs dotting this Austrian town are bilingual German/Slovak. The Slovaks living there like it mainly because, well, everything is so German – “It’s peaceful here,” says one, “with beautiful Nature, order and safety in the streets” – but also because the Austrian government offers great social welfare benefits, topped off by easily-attainable and cheap loans of up to €50,000 for home improvement. More »

National Press: Czech Republic

Tags: Austria, Bratislava, euro, Hungary, Schengen, Slovakia

See the face there, the wink? This is a NASA photograph, but it was recently brought forward to top an article in the Dutch Volkskrant*. And when was this particular sun-shot taken? Yes: on 22 December, just after the day when many claimed the Mayans had calculated that the world would end!

* Oh, and also in the Daily Mail, in case you’d like to read about it in English.

National Press: Netherlands

Tags: De Volkskrant, Mayans, Sun