No tweet here this time, sorry if you were expecting one, it seems La Dernière Heure is not on Twitter. You can follow Reporters Without Borders on Twitter, though, if that makes you feel any better, although they tweet – or is it pépier? – in French.

More to the point, though, they have their list of 2011′s 38 press-freedom “predators” on-line (and in English), although it’s in a one-webpage-per-predator format that enables a full treatment of each dictator but also makes it rather cumbersome to move from one to another. (At least the first one you encounter when you go to that webpage is Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad, an excellent candidate for the head-of-the-class.)

Really, La Dernière Heure’s analysis is itself sufficient to gain an appreciation of what’s going on with this year’s list. What’s mainly been going on – haven’t you heard? – is the “Arab Spring,” which has added some new entrants to this list as their true repressive colors were revealed amid the unrest, such as King Hamad Al-Khalifa of Bahrain. That has also tightened up the anti-press behavior of some of the world press’ perennial predators, such as in the People’s Republic of China and Azerbaijan, where authorities have felt the need to get even more nasty to try to head off anything like an “Arab Spring” happening where they live.

Otherwise, you’ll find the usual suspects here: Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Belarus’ Lukashenko, and so on. But there are also some unusual suspects: the Israeli Defense Forces, say, or countries like Italy, Spain, Mexico, and the Philippines where it is not the government per se but rather violent groups operating within the country (respectively, the Mafia and other organized crime, ETA, drug cartels, and private militias) that serve to make reporters’ lives hell.

And then – EU enlargement officials take note! – there is Turkey. It is not actually on the list of 38 predators, but rather gets an honorable mention on Reporters Without Borders’ own analysis page:

In Turkey (which received a Reporters Without Borders country visit in April), the problem is not just repressive laws, especially the counter-terrorism and state security laws, but also and above all abusive practices by the courts and judges due to their lack of knowledge of investigative journalism.

Think of this in, say, Standard & Poor’s terms: The outlook on Turkey has been set to “negative,” presaging a possible “downgrade” next year onto the “predators list” proper.

                          

Yet another aspect of Brussels hitting the “big time” lies in the realm of security, intelligence, and spying. Yes, there are now important, vital secrets buried there which intelligence services from around the world would love to ferret out, as we are reminded by a brief yet fascinating recent piece in La Dernière Heure*: Belgium bungles a European listening affair. It seems that as far back as in 2003 signs were detected of bugging devices located no less than in the Justus Lipsius Building, which is the home of the European Council (i.e. the EU organization that directly represents the interests of the member-states). In particular, the “R Committee” – “R” for renseignement or “information,” as that is the body of the Belgian parliament that supervises the country’s intelligence services – concluded that it was likely that the French, German, Spanish, and UK delegations had been bugged – i.e. most of the big boys.

By whom? Well, the piece mentions the Mossad, the (in)famous Israeli intelligence service, but no one ever found out for sure. That was mainly because Brussels is still stuck back in the provincial capital age – or perhaps we could call it the “Inspector Clouseau stage” – when it comes to effective counter-intelligence. That same “R Committee” report noted how progress in following up the initial discovery of the espionage activities was very slow, while information supplied by the responsible officials to Justice officials was incomplete. The latter just recently decided simply to drop the entire matter, as they still didn’t have anyone they could indict!

*The Dernière Heure piece generously credits its Dutch-language counterpart De Tijd with initial reports over this affair. In such cases I like to go to that original source instead and use the material there – but this time I could not find it on the De Tijd site!

                          

Belgium is effectively on the way to political break-up. Will the political chaos lead to financial turmoil & banking/sovereign debt stress?

January 10, 2011 7:34 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Nouriel

Nouriel Roubini

. . . wait a sec – look, I’m actually not ready to deal with such issues! Please allow me here instead to join so many Belgians, both French- and Dutch-speaking, in just letting my mind fly very, very far away from any thoughts of state bankruptcy, to the refuge of young feminine beauty. Yes, as so many national media outlets were there to report, Justine de Jonckheere (below, and more pictures here) was chosen last Sunday as Miss Belgium 2011.

Quite apart from the event’s intrinsic appeal, the Miss Belgium pageant is certainly a tonic in these times because of its sheer status as one Belgian national institution that has not been ripped into separate French- and Dutch-speaking halves. Indeed, as La Libre Belgique points out, Sunday evening’s event, broadcast out of the casino in the sea-side (and thus Flemish) town of Knokke, was a killer TV-event. It actually attracted more than 1 in 3 of French-speaking viewers, while the Flemish audience-share, at around 15%, was also double what other top shows usually attract on a Sunday evening.

That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no tension over the pageant’s results, considering so many native Belgians have such an interest in them. You can rest assured that, at any given time during the tournament, approximately half the country is encouraging – whether overtly or covertly – candidates from a French-Belgian (Walloon) background while the other half is rooting for the Dutch-speaking girls. It’s accepted that whoever wins needn’t necessarily know much about how to speak the country’s “other” language yet, but that one of her first duties (and those of the two runners-up) will be to start studying it to get up to a passable level of ability as soon as possible. Still, and as beautiful as she is, this year’s winner must have certainly induced a hard swallow among tournament officials, for her last name in particular – De Jonckheere – is almost at a slap-in-the-face level of Dutchness – most true French-speakers would have very little idea how to pronounce it! Nonetheless, year after year everyone is ready to accept any result – even that of 2008, when the winner was a Czech emigrée to Wallonia who could speak no Dutch at all – as long as the tournament process is, shall we say, free and fair.

The problem, dear readers, is that this year there are troubling signs that the Miss Belgium contest was anything other than that. For one thing, as La Dernière Heure reports, one contestant claims that the fix was in for Ms. De Jonckheere from nearly the beginning. Now, this whistle-blower is Maureen Lazard, a French-speaking contestant from Walloon Brabant, but she still alleges that Justine De Jonckheere had long been the favorite (in French: la chouchoute) of tournament director Darline Devos, for whatever reason, to the extent that everyone knew she was going to win and the selection process would be distorted to make that happen. (“Devos” is really a Dutch name – de vos, the fox, quite appropriate for a beauty-pageant director – so maybe that had something to do with it.)

Sour grapes from a loser – yes, that’s what all that sounds like. But there’s another, more serious allegation, this time reported in a Flemish newspaper, namely the “SHE” supplement to the Gazet van Antwerpen. Keep in mind that Ms. De Jonckheere is practiced in finding loopholes to rules – she’s a law student – and also that a certain weight in the decision about the winner is contributed by votes sent in from the general public as SMSs. SHE magazine cites evidence that the winner invested around €12,000 to buy telephone calling-cards to engineer a flood of incoming SMS votes in her favor. Again, the complaint has been lodged on behalf of – yes – another French-speaking contestant, a certain Lara Binet out of Liège, but the only answer tournament director Devos offers is that there could not have been any fraud, since she had monitoring personnel in place as votes were counted.

Sounds lame to me. And anyway: look at Justine’s picture again, at those shifty eyes! I have to conclude that the 2011 Miss Belgium Tournament has been tainted by scandal just when that sort of national institution that can truly draw the interests of the land’s Dutch- and French-speakers together was needed more than ever. There may still be the national football team; there may still be the national armed forces; but otherwise such institutions are falling by the wayside one-by-one, with grave implications for the country’s future and therefore for its solvency.

                          

They look human, of course (the one in the picture at the top of the article looks female; maybe they all do), but in human terms they are relatively small-sized (can’t intimidate the little ones) and dressed in bright colors. And their function does actually involve teaching, mainly that of languages where they perform interactive exercises like vocabulary drills.

As you would hope (or maybe as you would fear), they are programmed to be able to understand human emotions as well as language, and to respond appropriately. Or at least to those situations which their programmers were able to predict: journalist Kahine Benyacoub reports that they still occasionally are faced with some language, emotion, or general situation that just does not compute, in which case they boguer, meaning they act like their software has hit a bug. (Does someone from the principal’s office have to come in to reset them?)

And then there’s this quote that Benyacoub pulls out, from Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Science: “The computer scientists’ intentions are not to replace flesh-and-blood teachers, but to aid them with the development and instruction of the child.” Sure they are: as is indicated in the piece’s last paragraphy, however, battle-lines are already being drawn with the teachers’ unions over whether this new phenomenon is really such a good thing for all humans involved.

                          

The company’s progress within Europe is of particular amusement, especially Central Europe which, after all, originally introduced the café/coffeehouse and coffee culture in general to the world a little less than four centuries ago. It’s a bit as if GM were to establish a high-performance automotive division in Northern Italy, with the explicit mission of showing Ferrari, Lancia, etc. how the game should be played. Belgium, at least, has heretofore largely avoided this scourge, but apparently not for long, as we see from the recent article by Caroline Boeur in La Dernière Heure with the breathless title Soon a fifth Starbucks?

That’s right, right now all of Belgium boasts only four such establishments. (France, in contrast, has fifty). A full three of them are located together at Zaventem, the Brussels airport, while the fourth is at Antwerp’s central train station. As Boeur explains, in the first instance this has to do with Belgians’ preference for drinking their coffee at home, rather than in public: in contrast to the scant number of Starbucks, the Philips Senseo (a luxury coffee-maker) has 40% penetration among Belgian households, and apparently home expresso machines (which the Senseo is not; Boeur does not make that clear) have become “cult objects.”

Then again, the Antwerp Starbucks, in particular, has witnessed scenes usually only encountered at the opening of the first McDonalds at places like Moscow or Beijing: hundreds of people lined up before the doors hours before the official opening last 24 February, followed by profit figures that place it among the five-best within Europe. (Oh, and hundreds of fans on its very own Facebook fan page as well, although it’s safe to say that wasn’t true for McDonalds in Moscow or Beijing.)

Rest assured, then, that both Starbucks and its partner in Belgium, Autogrill (an Italian-headquartered firm specializing in restaurants at airports and auto rest-stops), are giving the task of further expansion top priority, although both are tight-lipped about when and where the next coffee shop will spring forth. And the fact that the DH can write on the subject with a tone that recalls movie star fan magazines shows that the media there continues to drink the purple Starbucks cool-aid – er, coffee.

                          

The tale is simple, and short. A Russian woman tried to cross the border back from China into Russia smuggling some parrots concealed in her special smuggling-clothes – fifty of them, in fact, worth the equivalent of €235. The one thing she forgot to do was give them some sort of narcotic birdseed beforehand to quiet them down, for at the decisive moment in front of the Russian officials silent they were not. “They woke up at that moment and started arguing [discuter] among themselves,” reads the police communiqué. “It was simply impossible for the customs-inspector and the tourists not to hear the parrots.” The authorities are of course commencing legal action against the perpetrator.

The main thing to me about this episode is how, despite its brevity, it has such comic potential (which I’ve tried to get a start on in the title). I bet we’ll be hearing more about his from one or more of the late-night comics that are left once their writers get wind of the incident. (Maybe some of them follow €S!) But I also encourage readers to have a crack of their own at formulating a joke, and to e-mail it to me: I promise to attach truly good ones – if any – in an UPDATE to this post.

* Comedian Craig Ferguson (Scottish, as is SuBo) had a bit of fun discussing that incident when “[s]he called the police after an intruder broke into her house, which must be terrifying. Imagine walking into a dark living room in the middle of the night and bumping into Susan Boyle!”

                          

Belgium’s La Dernière Heure picks up the story here, but they originally got it from that shining star of British journalism, the Sun, so you can read all about it in English here. (And those Belgians didn’t even include the extra bits, like how she can dance like Michael Jackson!)

                          

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.

                          

The problem boils down to one Cassandra D’Ermilio, a quite fetching brunette competitor for the Miss Belgium title, to be awarded on 23 December. (There’s a picture of her on the webpage, you can see for yourself.) Nonetheless, Cassandra already put her chances for victory in grave danger when an interview revealed that she is having problems recalling the most elementary facts about her country that she is really supposed to know – like when is the National Day? (That’s like a Miss America contestant not knowing what date Independence Day falls on; in Belgium it’s 21 July, as we have had occasion to note before in this weblog.) Or how many spheres make up the Atomium in Brussels? (That’s like . . . I don’t know, maybe it’s like a Miss America contestant not knowing how many presidents are carved into Mount Rushmore. The Atomium, by the way, is that gigantic monument, shown here, built to depict an iron crystal, that through the years has become the very symbol of the city after it was first erected on the occasion of the world-famous “Expo ’58” World Exposition there.) And speaking of that World Exposition, in fact, Cassandra also fails on that score: When asked “In which year did Expo ’58 occur?” she also could not come up with any answer to that! (That’s like a Miss America contestant not knowing the answer to “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”)

In reaction, Darline Devos, director of the Miss Belgium Committee, said “I find this very much a shame because we already gave the girls courses on Belgium. . . . The questions are not too difficult. . . . this shows that Cassandra has not reviewed [that Belgium material]. I’ve told the other girls to study up quick.” Fair warning, then, American beauties! Let there be no more excruciating Miss Teen South Carolina interviews!

                          

Now, of course this isn’t happening in Belgium, it’s happening in Saudi Arabia. And indeed, that marriage of the eight-year-old schoolgirl – arranged by her father – is an established fact. The news aspect is that the girl’s mother has appealed to a Saudi judge, one Sheikh Habib al-Habib, to invalidate the marriage. (In a further grotesque twist, “habib” in Arabic means “darling, beloved” – male gender – so the judge’s name is “Darling the Darling.”) However, for his part the husband has made it plain to the judge that he does not desire any such invalidation – under Saudi law he is allowed more than one wife, after all.

All of this is happening not in any major Saudi city, but in the town of Unayzah, some 420 km to the north of Riyadh. Further word comes to us from Abdallah Jtili [sic], lawyer for the girl’s mother: “The judge said he wanted to reflect on the affair further and give the parties time for a possible friendly settlement, before pronouncing a verdict,” which, if it turns out to be necessary, is scheduled for 20 December. Jtili adds that the girl in question “does not yet know she has been married.” Well okay, then.

The article goes on to note that another eight-year-old girl last April did succeed in divorcing the 28-year-old she had been forced to marry. But that was in Yemen.