The Danish opinion newspaper Information is now carrying this brief piece from the Ritzau news agency. Denmark only joined the EU’s Schengen Area of visa-free state-to-state travel with the other Nordic states in March, 2001, but now calls are issuing from some Danish politicians to temporarily re-impose border controls in the run-up to that “Cop15” United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place in Copenhagen starting the second week of December that you might have heard about.

Who specifically is making this demand? No surprise: it’s the Danish People’s Party, the influential and powerful party (although it’s not part of the current government) best known for its strict attitude towards immigrants, asylum-seekers, and foreigners in general. In particular, it was that party’s foreign affairs spokesman, Søren Espersen, who raised this demand when being interviewed on a Danish TV news show. “We want only proper (ordentlige) people come to Denmark,” he proclaimed – presumably referring only to the period around the climate conference, although you need to be careful because, if it could, the People’s Party would clearly raise that principle to general applicability. This is no idle request, either: Espersen made clear in that same interview that the People’s Party wants to see movement towards re-imposing those border controls before it will resume cooperating with the government in pushing an important new financial law through the Danish parliament, the Folketing.

The point is of course to try to keep out those elements who might try to come to Copenhagen to make trouble in the streets while all the international bureaucrats and heads of state/government are assembled for the climate conference. The Schengen Treaty apparently does allow for the sort of temporary re-imposition of border controls that the People’s Party is requesting (not that it particularly matters to the party’s politicians whether it is allowed or not). Their demand has also won support from the Danish Conservative Party, which is important since they’re actually in the government. (It has been dismissed, on the other hand, by the Socialist People’s Party – which matters less, since they are not.)

So are you planning to head to Denmark in the near future? (In particular: Are you planning to be in Copenhagen for the big conference? Really? How on earth did you find a hotel room, or do you have friends there?) If so, better be prepared for some extra checks as you cross the border.

Away from all the headlines, there’s an interesting development now in relations between the United States and Kenya, reported in the Dutch press from an ANP report by, among others, the Volkskrant (US follows through with threat to Kenyans).

American relations with Kenya will always be of special interest during the term of the Obama administration because of Obama’s personal ties and family history there, as will be relations with Indonesia for the same reason. However, and very interestingly, so far this effect is operating in the opposite way that you would expect. It almost seems as if both countries need to suffer a little bit, just to show that Obama is not going to play any favorites. In mid-November, for example, the American president is scheduled for an important tour of Asian countries: China, Japan, Korea, of course, also Singapore – but not Indonesia. Of course, it’s merely the most-populous Muslim nation; perhaps Obama is taking a break now from his “Arab outreach” efforts that previously featured a speech to Iranians and a speech directed to the Arab World, given in Cairo.

And then there is Kenya and the ANP report. The US “threat” is namely directed against high government officials and other “high-earners” there, and amounts to a refusal to give them visas anymore to visit the US. That apparently really hurts; rich Kenyans just love to head to the States to spend their money. But in the judgment of the US government nothing has been done to bring about promised reforms ever since the mess of the disputed national election at the end of 2007/beginning of 2008, which led to violence in which around 1,300 people died. In fact, no one has even been prosecuted in connection with that violence. So a fire needs to be lit under some people there.

The thing that caught my eye here, though – other than that it involves Kenya, homeland of Barack Obama Sr. – was the US official charged with paying a visit to Nairobi to deliver the bad news: Johnnie Carson, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Of course he’s not the real Johnny Carson (also note the different spelling), or he would be showing up just to practice his golf-swing. He’s merely a distinguished American career diplomat, a multiple award-winner for his service (including for directing the US Government’s anti-HIV/AIDS efforts in Kenya), who previously served as American ambassador to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda.

I first caught sight of this news-piece from an on-line article in L’Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party. I know, sad but true – but L’Humanité to me is nothing more than just another entry in my “France” RSS feed, I swear! And anyway, somehow the same thing has also been covered on-line on the Fox News site (but not more mainstream sources, like the Washington Post or even the New York Times), working from a Reuters report (which the Fox editors actually kept strictly factual – no vituperations against the President here at all!). Anyway, it seems that President Obama took advantage of the meeting he had in the Oval Office with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister of Spain, on 13 October to ask him to tell his foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, to pass along a personal message to Cuba – actually, to “the Cuban authorities.” The message was basically that the US was working to improve relations with the island-nation, but “if they don’t take steps too, it’s going to be very hard for us to continue.”

Perusing L’Humanité will further inform you – as looking at the Fox News article will not – that the paper that originally broke this story, appropriately enough, was Spain’s El País. So let’s go there and take a look: we can also handle the Spanish beat here on EuroSavant, though we don’t do it often. (more…)

I’m sorry, but some of the “old media” over here on this European continent just don’t get it when it comes to Twitter. A current example is the Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen with its brief piece “Twitter is a pedo-paradise”.

At least those quotation-marks are in the original title, as if to show that the Gazet editors aren’t quite ready to fully endorse that opinion. Still, the first paragraph reads in its entirety: “The social-networking site Twitter is a cost-free and easy hunting-ground for child-molesters, experts say.” Their proof? One “on-line conversation” between a pedophile and his 13-year-old prey as published in the English newspaper The Sun – one that is thoroughly banal (13-year-old: “Are you trying to seduce me?” Pedophile: “No, not at all. I just want to more more about you.”) besides coming from a source of little more use to the general public than as an exhibitor of “Page Three girls” and none at all when it comes to factual presentation. Oh, and let me add: besides constituting but one instance (an “anecdote,” in scientific parlance) of alleged evil behavior, and one whose use completely misinterprets the Twitter’s technological essence at that. Yes, it is possible to use Twitter to send an “@reply” to communicate directly with someone – but then everyone who subscribes to you can read the message, and anyone can find it afterwards through search. And it is also possible to send a “direct message” to someone, that no one else can read – although that’s only when the two parties subscribe to each others feed, and tell me how that is possible in a case of pedophilia other than after the child-molester has already gained his victim’s confidence through entirely other means!

But what Twitter is really all about is not one-to-one communication, but rather broadcasting – it’s basically a broadcaster of 140-character-or-less messages. In this light, it’s ridiculous to paint it as some potential tool for pedophiles. This article is simply brain-dead, looking to attract attention through the cynical spreading of rent-an-expert pedophilia alarm. And that’s sad, among other reasons because presumably plenty of people (Belgians who are Flemish, mostly) read the Gazet van Antwerpen and believe what they find there, and so will come away with a mistaken negative impression of what has proven to be quite an innovative and useful communications tool.

You’ve got to hand it to Michael Jackson – or, rather, to the executors of his estate, who seem to have digested well the lesson that Elvis Presley has made more money since he died in 1977 than he ever did during his actual lifetime. There’s already a new Jacko single out, released last week and entitled “This Is It,” and you may also be aware of the movie and soundtrack – both of that same name – due for release worldwide at the end of this month.

But wait – there’s more! As Serge Bressan of the Belgian paper La Dernière Heure now reports, there’s also a Michael Jackson novel due out next June. This news comes, naturally, out of the just-concluded 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, where the announcement was made by representatives of the American publishing concern Random House.

Bressan was able to get further details from an unnamed French-based editor returning from Frankfurt. The work will be entitled Fated, and it will be a graphic novel of 200 pages or so – that is, a comic-strip novel, in black-and-white, drawn by an Indian gentleman, Mukesh Singh. Apparently Jackson had been working on it for a couple years with Gotham Chopra, son of the medical author and lecturer Deepak Chopra. You won’t be surprised to hear that the plot deals with a pop-icon who can’t deal with all the fame.

What’s next? If Elvis is anything to go by, you can expect rumors to arise soon that Jacko really didn’t die – or that he did but has come back to life by the power of pop, why not? – followed by scattered claims by people of having seen him alive, at the grocery store, at the kindergarten, one white-gloved hand and all.

Did you catch those violent scenes on the news this past weekend? Sure, there are violent scenes going on at any given time at many places throughout the world, but these were headlined by the spectacular shooting-down of a police helicopter. (Remember the video of that?) At least 16 dead, with many burning vehicles, as heavily-armed police moved against the local drug-mafia in the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro.

Wait a second . . . isn’t that the same city that just recently was awarded the right to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games? Indeed it is, as Gerhard Dilger points out in his brief commentary-piece in Berlin’s Tageszeitung or taz: Alarm in the Olympic-city. That sort of bloodshed just won’t do while the Olympics are going on, but at this stage it’s difficult to imagine how it can be stopped: the author cites casualties of 100 people per month at the hands of Rio’s militarized police.

Well, Dilger concludes that it’s simply time for Brazilian politicians, from President Lula da Silva on down, to start imagining harder. A cheap answer is simply to call off the police and let the drug-gangs operate unhindered; while he does not go so far as to advocate that, he does urge thinking hard about how this sort of repression is responsible for making the drug trade so lucrative in the first place. In effect – although he does not state it explicitly – he is advocating drug legalization for Brazil.

At the same time, there needs to be a massive infusion of public investment in those favelas to produce schools, hospitals, public housing, etc. to address the wide gap between rich and poor in Brazilian society that results in the illegal activity that prompts such violence. World cities know anyway when they submit their bids to host the Olympic Games that they need to be ready to make tremendous investments in supporting infrastructure should they succeed in winning them. Dilger asserts here that not only is the same is true for Rio, but that hosting the 2016 Games is a Riesenchance – a gigantic chance – to summon the political will even to go beyond Olympic facility investments to undertake initiatives designed to heal the very real clefts remaining in Brazilian society.

On the old media/new media front, a couple of German on-line sources give us an update on how the landscape is evolving over there.

First there is a brief piece in Der Spiegel about the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or FAZ. The FAZ’s fortunes are worth tracking because, like the New York Times in the US, it is really Germany’s own “newspaper of record.” (You can even call it the Teutonic “Grey Lady” as well if you like, since it still publishes no illustrations of any kind on its front page, but always has instead two commentary articles over on the right side, with their headlines in the old Gothic script.) Of course, as with the Times it’s also true for the FAZ that it is currently suffering heavily from declining subscriptions and declining advertising revenues, to the point that it expects to suffer a financial loss this calendar-year “in the area of the high single-millions [of euros]” – the precise number will of course depend upon how things turn out over the holiday period rounding out the year. Still – and here’s a contrast with the Times – management has ruled out any lay-offs. Of course, they’ve also had a hiring-freeze in place for a year, and the “no lay-offs” stance is also dependent upon an anticipated upturn in the paper’s fortunes sometime in the second half of next year, so that it will be able to actually turn a profit through 2010. So maybe the difference here with American employment practice is not the German’s being more “compassionate” in holding on to employees, but merely being more deluded about the future. (more…)

So the returns are in and, as we all know very well, it’s Rio de Janeiro that has been chosen by the International Olympic Committee to host the 2018 Summer Olympic Games. But competition to bring Olympic Games to one’s own city never really takes a rest. The 2010 Winter Games are due up soon (quick: Where will they be held? Do you even know?), which also means that the time is coming up to pick the city for another future Winter Olympics, namely the 2018 Games.

Brit Therkildsen of the Danish newspaper Politiken has a brief treatment about how that 2018 competition is shaping up. The short answer: underpopulated. The stimulus for her article in the first place is the fact that the deadline for applications for the 2018 Winter Games passed yesterday, and ultimately only three “cities” succeeded in putting themselves forward. I write “cities” because one of those is Pyeongchang, which is not really a city. “Sure it is!” you might be yelling, “It’s the capital of North Korea! What on earth are those leftist pinkos on the IOC thinking?” No, no – calm down! Pyeongchang is certainly Korean, but South Korean: it’s a “county” in northeast South Korea, not really that far from the “Demarcation Line” dividing the North from the South (they are still technically at war with each other – hmmm), but with “long, cold winters” and plenty of mountains, so presumably possessing what it takes (if you add massive money for construction to the mix) to stage the Winter Games. Plus, this is the third Winter Games in a row that Pyeongchang has officially applied to host. (more…)

Still interested in President Obama being awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize? Hope so, because I’ve got some revelations here about what went on behind-the-scenes. They come from a Ritzau report taken up in Berlingske Tidende (Nobel committee was split about Obama). “Split”? It seems that, for most of the time, three of the Peace Prize committee’s five members definitely did not think Obama should be awarded the Prize – he had only been in office as President for nine months, for Heaven’s sake!

Actually, the Ritzau/Berlingske coverage here is really at-one-remove, as they basically pass on original reporting that appeared in the Norwegian newspaper VG. That article you can find here (“Nobel-majority argued against Obama”), and even if you don’t understand Norwegian you really should click through to take a look, because it offers a great prize: there you can see in a photograph, sitting around a table, the actual group of Norwegian notables (“socialists,” “muddled-headed Europeans,” “Obama-groupies,” “Devil’s spawn,” however you want to characterize them) who were directly responsible for him receiving the prize. The three ladies with their heads circled were actually the doubters; in fact, Berlingske quotes the right-most of them (i.e. turning to her left to address the camera) as remarking later to the press “I had expected more debate, especially over the fact that I myself regard as problematic, namely the war in Afghanistan.”

By the way, the committee doesn’t have six members, but five, so that one of the gentlemen off to the right is not actually a voting-member and doesn’t belong there. I’m guessing that the bona fide guy is probably with the red necktie, and that would be the committee chairman, former Norwegian prime minister and current Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland. He’s really the one Obama can thank for his Prize (assuming that Obama is actually grateful for the Prize; there are reasons for thinking that he isn’t): despite the three nay-sayers dismissing the President’s candidacy from early in the selection-discussions, Jagland persevered as chairman (with some support from the one lady whose head is not circled, Sissel Rønbeck) and finally got his way. “The rest,” as they say, “is history” – but one can still speculate on what the outcome would have been had the three dissenters been male and the committee chairman female.

First subject for today: ringtones. Maybe you have a special one for your mobile telephone. Soon, though, you might be called upon to choose one for your new car. Well, at least Jyllands-Posten journalist Kurt Hedevang is using “ringtone” for the artificial motor-noise your future electric car may make just to let everyone else know of its presence (Get your own “ringtone” for your car). As he points out, for decades auto manufacturers have striven to come up with vehicles with ever-quieter engines – silence was good, it was the ideal to aim for. Now, however, for electrical vehicles a silent drive-train is a given, and suddenly that’s not so much of a good thing. It’s not as if there has been any wave of incidents where these vehicles caused injury; they’re still too rare for that. Nevertheless, their manufacturers now are determined to add some noise – artificial, if need be – to their vehicles to let other vehicles, near-by playing children, etc. know that they are there. Their stance is supported by a recent study from the University of California that showed that people could detect a conventional vehicle approaching at 8 km/hr from nine meters away, but an electric car only by the time it was 2 meters away.

Electric cars, it seems then, will make some noise. Hedevang quotes a New York Times article (which I could not track down) to the effect that the Japanese manufacturers Nissan and Toyota are onto this issue already: the former is seeking advice from the film industry (!) about which sounds to use, while the latter is content to consult the Japanese traffic authorities and interest-groups for the blind. But why not just let the customer choose his new car’s “ringtone”? There is also a quote from a BMW spokesperson that that should soon be possible for that company’s electric cars, but customers of the ultra-luxury “Karma” electric car from Fisker Automotive already get to do that. (So Hedevang’s article says; as for me, I could not find any reference to the choosing-your-own-engine-noise option on that Fisker Automotive website.)

Of course, you’ll always encounter contrary opinions to groundbreaking developments like this, and here those come from one Paul Scott of Santa Monica, CA, vice-president of the electric car interest-group “Plug In America.” Naturally, he owns and drives such a vehicle, a nice and quiet Toyota RAV4. For him, silence in a vehicle is next to godliness; having labored for so long to get to the silent motor, automotive engineers should not now be forced to surrender their achievement. Instead, by his reasoning it is still properly the vehicle driver’s responsibility to make sure he doesn’t hit anyone. So what does Scott do? Whenever he drives up to a (blind) corner, he opens up his Toyota’s window and turns up the radio.

From a brief piece in the Gazet van Antwerpen by Gunter Willekens we get the very interesting news that Belgium has some sort of advertising “ethics code” that prohibits Christmas-related marketing prior to November 1. Now that’s an interesting solution (although perhaps also a “European socialist” one, like universal access to health care) to the annoying phenomenon of “Christmas creep” whereby Christmas advertising and even public decorations appear earlier and earlier in the year throughout the Western World. This weekly feature, for instance (careful: it’s mainly about American football), has constantly tracked (and bemoaned) this “Christmas creep” and now reports that it has now started to be noticeable even in August! (Go to the link but then scroll down about a third of the way, to the heading “Christmas creep.”) This restriction is all the more impressive when you consider that in Belgium the big loot-accumulating day for children (oh sorry: the Christmas holiday) is not December 25 – although there is an Xmas celebration then, too – but earlier, on 6 December, St. Nicholas’ Day. And it is in fact that St. Nicholas (better known as Sinterklaas and pictured above) who plays the big Christmas sugar-daddy, not any “Santa Claus.”

That “ethics code” provision, then, basically amounts to a prohibition on displaying good ol’ Sinterklaas’ image on advertising materials before November 1. But Willekens’ article further reveals that toy retailers and the like this year are pretty desperate to move their Xmas goods and so have already started sending out their advertisements, handbills, and the like using the obvious loophole: they simply don’t include Sinterklaas. But they do include promises of savings of up to 20% off regular prices.

As a bibliophile, one event near and dear to my heart is the Frankfurter Buchmesse or Frankfurt Book Fair*, which takes place every year in the second week of October and has been doing so for some five hundred years (missing a few years on rare occasion due to wars and such) since shortly after Johannes Gutenberg invented movable-type printing in the first place in the near-by city of Mainz. I even managed to attend this event once and so can attest that, although it’s mainly meant for publishing professionals, visiting it is well worth the while of any mere civilian with any interest in books – even despite the knotty problem of finding someplace affordable to stay as local hotel rates skyrocket.

This year, however, I had no interest in making the journey even if I could get away. It was clear things were going to be especially awkward. One main highlight of each Buchmesse is the exhibitions and events put on for the literature of the “guest of honor” country, but this year that Ehrengast was to be the People’s Republic of China. That’s right: not the country in the world known particularly for its free press or tolerance of free expression, which you would think would be central themes to the very ethos of the annual Frankfurt goings-on. Maybe the Buchmesse executives, after honoring one country each year for so long, simply ran out of non-problematic countries to feature. More likely – since this custom of Ehrengast countries/literatures probably does not go back that far in time – someone in charge rather felt it was time to acknowledge the economic/political/demographic gorilla in the room and finally come to grips with granting the People’s Republic that one-time special status that it “deserves.” (more…)

One noteworthy French media institution which I don’t deal with at all on this site is the Chained Duck, or Le Canard Enchaîné, a “satirical weekly” newspaper that comes out each Wednesday, and which has a long history going back to 1915. I don’t deal with it partly because its unique brand of journalism – similar to the late-lamented British magazine Punch, but with even more of a political bite – by its very nature is highly idiomatic, but mainly because its website indeed looks much like you would expect a website to have looked like in 1915, if there had been websites then.

To some extent that publication’s non-approachability is a shame, because its reporters do perform some serious journalism (before twisting it up in the house humor-style) and achieve scoops. Fortunately, no less than France’s own “grey lady” of journalism, Le Monde, considered Le Canard’s latest revelation to be worth taking up and passing along on its own pages (When the Elysée practices piracy).

First off, you need to know that the Elysée Palace is where the President of the French Republic lives, so that these days Elysée basically means “Nicolas Sarkozy” the way “White House” means “Barack Obama.” And it does seem that Président Sarkozy has engaging in a bit of piracy lately, or at least his people have. A documentary was shown on French television this past summer about him (actually, the evening before Bastille Day); it was part of a series called À visage découvert, or “With discovered face,” produced by Galaxie Presse. He must have liked it, because his office shortly thereafter asked Galaxie Presse to send along fifty DVD copies of the show for them to distribute further. It turned out, however, that they ended up distributing at least 400, and each such DVD carried the mark not of Galaxie Presse, but rather the seal of the President of the Republic along with the accompanying highly-ironic and minatory text “Audio-visual service of the president of the Republic – All rights reserved (photos and video).”

Further investigation by Canard reporters revealed that the Director of Galaxie Presse, Michel Rager, certainly had never been informed of the Elysée’s intentions to play a bit of a “loafs-and-fishes” game with the original fifty DVDs his company had provided – for free. The real point here, of course, is that France in recent years has taken the lead within Europe in instituting legal penalties against the illegal downloading and copying of digital materials; as the reaction from reader “Pirate” that Le Monde puts off to the right side of this piece points out, the illegal-copying action of the president’s office is supposed to bring criminal penalties of up to three years in jail and a €300,000 fine. The word “hypocrisy” in French, by the way, is easy enough for anyone to remember: hypocrisie.

Let’s take a quick look at what they’re saying in the Danish press about the awarding today to President Barack Obama of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize – “Danish” because that is as close as I can come linguistically to the Swedish deliberations behind its awarding (and the Norwegian arrangements for the conferring ceremony on December 10).

– From the Danish Christian newspaper, Kristeligt Dagblad (Obama gives Nobel money to a good cause): Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama intends to give the 10 million Swedish kroner prize-money to a good cause, which he has not yet had time to specifically identify, according to a White House spokesman. He will also travel to Oslo on December 10 to accept the award there; Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg has already discussed this with him. Ah, but you may also be asking: How will this sudden new Scandinavian appointment affect the US president’s involvement at the UN’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen which will be going on at the same time? According to this report, it does not necessarily increase the chances that Obama will actually decide to attend that climate change conference.

(Note: This is a report from the Ritzau news agency, so the identical text appears in several other Danish newspapers as well. But in one of those we get the added detail that the “expert” behind the above calculation that Obama’s appointment in Oslo in December won’t necessary mean he shows up for the climate conference in Copenhagen – which, by the way, I don’t believe for a second – is namely Aarhus University Professor of Contemporary History Thorsten Borring Olesen.)

– The daily Berlingske Tidende offers some commentary in one article (Obama: Both a certain and a controversial choice), but doesn’t bother to credit the journalist(s) involved. Anyway: Awarding the prize to Obama was certain (sikkert): he is popular everywhere on this Earth, the nearest thing to every man’s friend. Awarding the prize to Obama was, however, controversial: Obama has been all about promises so far, not results. Maybe the Nobel committee was impressed with the resolution calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons that he managed to have the UN Security Council pass a few weeks ago while he functioned as its Chairman – on the other hand, in reality none of the nuclear powers, including the US, has done anything to fulfill the promise they made to the rest of the world at the time of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, back in 1968, that they would work to reduce and then eliminiate their nuclear arsenals, in exchange for that rest of the world giving up any idea of developing nuclear weapons of their own. Or perhaps it’s about his efforts to counteract climate change, or to shut Guantánamo – except, again, there actually hasn’t been tangible progress in these areas, either. No, the purposes the Nobel committee had in giving this prize to the President was both to give him “a tremendous moral pat on the shoulder” and to pointedly remind other countries (the exact Danish phrase is “hint with a wagon-pole”) that the American president is going to need some help from them if what he has promised is going to come true – so that that Nobel committee doesn’t find itself embarrassed a few years down the road at what it did today.

– The preeminent Danish opinion weekly, Information hasn’t yet gotten around to providing its own judgment or study of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama. For now, it presents an analysis (again from Ritzau) from Prof. Peter Viggo Jacobsen, of the Copenhagen University Social Sciences Faculty (Obama is a highly surprising choice). Along with about a billion other people around the world, he interprets the prize as being awarded in anticipation of future achievements, not of past accomplishments since “he has not been able yet to carry out anything at all.” Further Jacobsen:

Normally there should be more then words [behind the award]. There should also be some action. And action is what we haven’t seen much of yet. This has to be in anticipation of something later, that the [Nobel] committee believes that he is capable of realizing some of the good intentions he has.

Germany confronts the Chinese threat – and all within the pages of the leading German commentary weekly Die Zeit! That is what we can now find on-line in the form of the article Should I learn Chinese now? Look closer, though, and the treatment is not quite what it might seem from the title; the piece actually originates from the Zeit Campus spin-off magazine, and so the article (by Nadja Kirsten and Philipp Schwenk) in its essence explores what the authors describe as “China as learning-factory that spits out cheap competitors into the world academic market.” Ultimately, as they show based on interviews conducted with a handful of German students actually studying in China and other available experts, this image is hardly true at all – despite that photograph of massed ranks of identically-clad graduates (yes, mostly in red) that the Zeit Campus editors chose to adorn the space just below the article’s headline and lede.

Kirsten and Schwenk do bring forth amazing facts about Chinese schools and Chinese students, some of which we have surely all heard before. The idea is that, seemingly throughout the entire breadth of the 1.3 billion citizens making up Chinese society, education is attended to fanatically as the best (and for many the only) means to advance oneself. So students routinely show up at school in the morning up to an hour before classes actually start, to get some preparation time in; and throughout their academic careers they have to deal with a constant stream of publicly-posted lists of class-rank and who scored precisely in what order on any individual examination. (more…)

We all know about surveillance cameras (a.k.a. CCTV, or closed-circuit television). They’re supposed to protect us against crime, but they have a big problem: no one is really watching them, most of the time. That means that, at best, such cameras may have value after-the-fact in providing recorded video evidence (for submission to a trial, say), but do little to alert people when a crime is being committed or to send immediate help – or indeed, some reports say, even to deter crime.

All this notwithstanding, the UK is the world’s CCTV paradise, with by some accounts 1.5 million cameras in operation in various public spaces there. The problem remains of monitoring all those cameras sufficiently to be able to fully draw on the technology’s supposed benefits. Doing that with computers is one technique that is coming along, one that supposedly is not the answer yet, although doubtless it will be soon. In the meantime, articles in both Le Monde (Yoyeurism rewarded in Great Britain) and in the Nouvel Observateur (One society proposes to reward informants) have now drawn their respective readerships’ attention to a new private initiative in the UK called Internet Eyes (“Catch a criminal online”; “Become a Viewer for FREE”), where the essential idea is to get volunteers to watch these cameras, through the Internet, in the hopes of spotting crime as it happens and alerting the authorities for a cash reward. Go on and click through to check out the site: just like that girl you see there, you could soon be sitting back in the evening on your coach, relaxing with your laptop as you scan for criminals! Note in particular that, listed just below the heading “Typical event notifications include:” is “Anti social [sic] behavior” – defined by whom?

Anyway, any of you who are interested can simply head to this piece in the (London) Times to read a more lengthy treatment, in English of course, with many more details (including the assertion in the picture-caption up top that Britain in fact has 4.2 million CCTV cameras operational). The French input to all this is simply that those two publications from the Continent tipped me off to this story to begin with. Indeed, I’m otherwise rather disappointed in them for what is really in both cases a spare, “just the facts” treatment of Internet Eyes – the only hint of opinion comes in each article’s title – when you really would expect more contemplation of what this all means from the mainstream press of such a philosophically-inclined and intellectual land.

(Gee, you’re right: I’m more-or-less guilty of the same offense, including saving my most intense opinionating for this post’s title. I can only respond that I still don’t know what to think about it all. I do really hate the CCTV cameras, but then again, examination of that Wikipedia page about them started me contemplating the 1993 murder of that two-year-old Liverpool boy by two ten-year-olds, a crime that leaned heavily on CCTV footage for its solution.)

That great Dutch daily Trouw has a brief but significant piece up now: “Newspapers return to paid sites”. If you spend any other time on the ‘Net (other than poring over EuroSavant, that is!) you might be aware that there has already been talk of many American newspapers returning to some sort of pay-for-your-news format in a last bid to survive financially. Well, this piece (sourced to the Dutch news agency ANP) is mainly about a new study out of the Free University of Brussels, conducted among 87 Western European newspapers, which concludes that something similar is also in the works over here. Such papers have watched closely as leading publications such as the New York Times and the Financial Times a few years ago tried making themselves totally free once again, hoping to earn big with advertising, only to see that ad revenue go mainly to Google, where it did not instead shrink in absolute terms due to worsening economic conditions.

Mind, not a single paper is named here – it’s just a warning shot across the bow, so to speak. But while the message is interesting in itself, despite the lack of specifics, astute readers will recognize the direct relevance here to this very weblog. My policy continues to be that I review only freely-available on-line publications, so that any reader who wants to can click through to see the article(s) I am discussing him/herself. (The furthest concession I made in the past to any restrictions was covering papers that required initial free registration.) This news therefore seems somewhat ominous; I guess we’ll simply have to see what actually happens – i.e. which publications do decide to retreat behind a pay-wall – and then come up with a reaction from there.

Assiduous €S readers were rewarded for their diligence about a month ago when they got early word on this site about that attempt to smuggle high-performance anti-aircraft missiles to Iran aboard the Russian freighter Arctic Sea, concealed under a cargo of Finnish wood, and the unconventional measures which the Russian authorities took to call a halt to that. Now Danish newspapers are reporting some funny business in connection with the Arctic Sea’s “sister ship” – presumably another freighter (unnamed) with the same Russian ownership.

(The identical brief news-text about this appears in at least three on-line Danish papers that I’ve been able to identify; it’s a Ritzau news agency pooled report. I hate that; but OK, I’ll just close my eyes, jab my finger blindly and select to link to . . . Arctic Sea’s sister-ship runs aground, in the mainstream daily newspaper Politiken.)

What’s up? It’s pretty simple: This unnamed sister-ship has run aground off the Swedish coast, not far (northeast) from Stockholm, near the town of Norrtälje. Still, it’s mysterious: that part of the Swedish coast is pretty dangerous (check it out here, all those islands everyplace), and everyone knows that, so it is carefully marked with buoys, lighthouses, etc. instructing incoming ships “Go this way!” and “Don’t go that way!” Well, this sister-ship went a way it wasn’t supposed to go, according to Swedish Coast Guard spokesman Kenneth Neijnes, and suffered the predictable result. So the authorities got the vessel unstuck, towed it to a secure location, and took the crew off for some questioning. Who knows, maybe they’re all a bunch of Russian FSB agents again, up to no good.

Yes, and the German weekly Die Zeit is already on the ball and ready with its coverage. To start with, the schedule of prize-announcements is here; it lets us know that the Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry prizes will be announced around noon on Monday (today), Tuesday, and Wednesday, respectively. As perhaps befits subjects not belonging to the exact sciences, the Peace and Literature prizes are simply supposed to be out sometime by the beginning of next week (meaning presumably by next Monday). That is also when the winner of the Economics Prize will be announced – also not an exact science, many will say, but in any case the one “Nobel Prize” that is not a Nobel Prize, since Alfred Nobel never provided for any economics prize in his will and it was rather set up in parallel to the Nobel Prizes by the Swedish Central Bank in 1968.

If you’d like a scorecard to follow along with as the award-announcements proceed through the coming days, the Die Zeit piece links to this survey of potential winners, in English, from Thomson Reuters. This time it’s the “exact sciences” plus economics about which the (unnamed) Thomson Reuters reporters speculate, not the “softer” subjects that are more interesting for this observer, namely Peace and Literature. Still, it should be interesting to see whether anyone on their candidate-lists actually wins the respective prize.

Back to Die Zeit, it tops its pre-coverage off, in the hope that the next week will swell the ranks of German winners, with this picture-gallery of the German Nobel winners since 1979. Or at least what it wants to label as such – they somehow neglect to include Günter Grass, winner of the Literature Prize in 1999. In setting that arbitrary cut-off year they also exclude probably the most famous German Nobel prize-winner of them all, namely Willy Brandt, winner in 1971 (for his Ostpolitik reconciliation policy).

One final complaint I have to add is that, although that 1979 cut-off does allow the possibility of the German winners being East German winners, the descriptions of each person don’t usually provide enough information for one to be able to assume or to exclude that possibility, at least in many cases. On the other hand, the 18th winner in the picture-series (out of 21), Ernst Ruska who invented the electron-miscroscope, is described as having done his most important work “five decades ago,” i.e. in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. This hardly invalidates the magnitude of his achievement, of course, nor would any connection on the part of any of the other prize-winners to the DDR; it just would be interesting to know.

In light of Chicago’s surprise last-place finish in the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) deliberations over which city would get to host the 2016 Summer Games, considering that the Committee met in Copenhagen it’s perhaps worthwhile to take a look at the Danish press to try to answer various questions. Like: What happened? How could Chicago have lost? (more…)

After French/Polish director Roman Polanski’s arrest last Saturday night as he was trying to enter Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival where he would accept an award, the first public reactions from his countries of citizenship expressed outrage. More substantively, both the French and Polish foreign ministers issued a joint appeal to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to intervene, which she declined to do.

Now almost a week after the fact, however, attitudes seem to be changing about the case, to Polanski’s detriment. Jan Cienski of the Global Post has a pretty good summary of how that is occuring in Poland, while Doreen Carvajal and Michael Cieply of the New York Times posit the same development in France. (The NYT editors themselves take up the attitude to the case that seems to prevail throughout the American continent: Polanski must be returned to the US to face justice.)

A trip through the on-line French press does turn up indications that the tide has turned against the Oscar-winning director. (more…)

Serendipity is once again at work here on this site, meaning that you get yet another piece from Belgium’s Het Nieuwsblad. It was the title that caught my eye this time: President of Guinea accuses opposition of bloodbath. That would be the incident from last Monday when soldiers from the presidential guard opened fire on people at the national stadium in the country’s capital, Conakry, who were demonstrating against President Moussa “Dadis” Camara’s intention to take part in the upcoming presidential election. Camara became president in the first place by simply seizing power from his base in the army last December after the previous dictator, Lansana Conté, had died.

An otherwise-unnamed human rights organization based in Guinea estimates that about 160 people were killed at the stadium and more than 1,200 wounded, and other nasty things occurred as well, particularly against women, that I will forbear from detailing here. The government, on the other hand, maintains that only 57 people died, most of them trampled in the stampeding crowd. From President Camara: “It was the opposition politicians who led other people’s children to their deaths, while their own children sat comfortably elsewhere.” Anything untoward that might have happened, he declared, was due to “uncontrollable elements in the army,” which he can’t be expected to take responsibility for. You’ll be glad to know, though, that his government does intend to financially compensate the victims’ families.

In a masterpiece of reporting-by-understatement (by a journalist who, unfortunately, is credited only as “loa”), the Flemish paper Het Nieuwsblad reported yesterday on that new law in Arizona, USA that you might have heard about that allows citizens to take their loaded firearms into café’s and restaurants where alcohol is served.

Bear in mind, though: The armed can come into those places, but they aren’t allowed to drink any alcohol themselves. And they can’t come in at all if the owner happens to think it might not be such a good idea and posts a “No Firearms” sign at the door: around 1,300 of the roughly 6,000 establishments eligible to welcome a bit of packed heat have thought the better of it and “requested such a sign,” although they also are allowed just to print one out for themselves.

(For example, bar owner Brad Henrich unwittingly helps us learn an interesting Flemish expression when in the article he characterizes the very idea of mixing weapons with alcohol as welhaast bezopen: roughly “just about plastered/smashed,” i.e. crazy with drink.)

Naturally, the National Rifle Association needs to be consulted here for its view of the issue, and spokesman J.P. Nelson helpfully points out that this is nothing new, that similar laws are in effect in 40 other states. He then adds:

Funny things happen in cafés. People want to have a weapon on them, and if the café-owner has no problem with that, then there should be no problem. If someone drinks and gets in a shootout and kills someone, then he naturally must be prosecuted by the law.

Indeed, some other establishment-owners positively welcome the new law as enabling a “deterrent” (afschrikmiddel). It’s precisely those places posting “No Firearms” that criminals will go after, claims restaurant-owner Marc Peagler: “[They] know that no one is there who can stop them.”