Time for a quick “day-after” survey of French press coverage of the Iraqi elections.

As usual, “day-after” is sometimes too early when it comes to significant, multi-dimensioned world events, as journalists and editors get all caught up with the reporting and don’t yet have time to sit back and think about what it all really meant. If you want an example of what I’m talking about here, and can read French yourself, I refer you to Le Monde’s editorial this morning, The Iraqi Wager. Spotlight on young French-Iraqi student; for her and her mother, being able to vote for the first time is truly a moving experience. (And this in what Le Monde explicitly labels its “editorial,” written collectively by the editors.) Yes yes, and you know, Iraq has truly never had elections. These first were admittedly imperfect: Sunni underrepresentation, the threat of violence. Still, they were at least a relative success, and hopefully Iraqis can look forward to much less imperfect elections next December. Right, moving on . . .

Libération is a bit better in analyzing what author Jean-Pierre Perrin terms in his piece’s title The Lessons of a Confessionalized Election. (more…)

The proverbial fly-on-the-wall managed to give his report of the interesting discussions that took place last week in Davos, during the annual World Economic Forum gathering of the world’s movers-and-shakers that comes to a close tomorrow. That “fly” was one of the publishers of Germany’s Die Zeit, Dr. Josef Joffe, and the star of the show (actually, a private dinner) was the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi (whose name in German is apparently spelled “Charazi”). Joffe found that if he closed his eyes (and of course made allowance for the accent) he could just as well have been listening to George W. Bush or Condi Rice, as he writes in American-Iranian Unison.

The subject was tomorrow’s long-awaited (long-feared?) Iraqi general elections. And Kharazi was delighted about them. Not only that, but he was also glad to give the Bush administration props (strictly within what he thought was the limited scope of a private dinner party, you understand) for its grim determination that they were going to happen on 30 January 2005, and not a day later. Postponing them in any way, according to him, would have been a victory for the Baathists and the terrorists. (more…)

OK, OK, we’re back to serious again, although we remain in Denmark. The main serious thing that is happening there currently is that there’s an election campaign going on, heading for a vote scheduled for February 8. Here is CNN’s coverage if you want a little background; basically the incumbent premier, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is currently doing well in the polls, is required to hold a general election sometime this year, and so would to prefer to do so now.

But I don’t expect you to care. Shoot, I don’t care myself. If you send your web-browser to EuroSavant expecting at all to read Danish election coverage on any sort of regular basis, well, then you clearly misunderstand the wildly-scattershot quality that is central to this weblog’s self-conception. (Look, I’ve got eight languages to cover – don’t forget to include English! – and a focus that, if it even merits that name, shifts abruptly and unpredictably with my very whim.)

No, we don’t care about the upcoming election to the Danish Folketing (that’s their unicameral parliament) per se; what we might care about is the remarkable or even silly things that the pressures of such an election campaign might move Danish political parties and/or politicians to utter. And we have a prize specimen here today, from Politiken: Danish People’s Party Wants to Forbid Other Languages. (more…)

Ah great, a short-but-spicy piece to get us back into the blogging swing of things! From the Danish press this time: Berlingske Tidende has a notable account (taken from the Danish press agency, Ritzau) about standards of after-the-sale service provided in the Danish retail sector.

The article is actually entitled Flasher by Video Mobile Telephone, and tells the tale of a 40-year-old salesman in a mobile telephone store in Hillerod (a suburb of Copenhagen) who has confessed to the authorities to more than one hundred violations of public decency. Women who came to his store to purchase a mobile telephone with video capabilities could usually look forward to seeing him again, for he would take advantage of the telephone number information he had about them to take the initiative and call them. The problem was not so much that they were seeing him again, but that they were seeing him again in their new video phones naked. And he just wouldn’t stand there, either; he tended to, shall we say, use the occasion to handle his merchandise, by which I really mean “manhandle,” I guess.

This is Denmark, though, after all, and the accused was released on his own recognizance after interrogation. (I do hope they remembered to relieve him of his mobile telephone!) Still, as the article sternly ends, he can certainly “look forward to legal consequences.”

UPDATE: Another day passes, and the Berlingske Tidende editors are still interested in this story. Only they still haven’t quite reached the point where they’ll assign one of their own reporters to it; the account contained in this update (“Over 100 Women Exposed to Mobile-Flasher”) they credit to the Frederiksborg Amts Avis which, with all respect, really seems to be basically your run-of-the-mill pissant local-news newspaper. (No, EuroSavant will certainly not add it to the site’s Danish newspaper coverage list.)

Be that as it may . . . any further juicy details? Not really. The article recounts how around 100 women have complained about those specific performances by the suspect in their video mobile phone screens that they never expected to see, while the actual total of victims is reckoned to be considerably higher because of the natural reluctance in such a case to report the harassment. But the original Ritzau article essentially also said that. This new article does add details about how tough it was to track the offender down, since he was using an unregistered calling-card, so that investigators had to put together evidence about where the various calls had been placed to pin down the perpetrator.

Administrative entry here, as much as we try to keep them few-and-far-between. Over the past month-and-a-half or so I’ve really been plagued by comment spam. You can read some background here about what this has all been about – what it is these nasty people are trying to gain by this behavior – together with my past warning here that I would have to turn comments to this weblog off every so often to ward away this plague. Like when I went to bed: things really got old the first couple times I failed to do that and so woke up and logged-on to find unbelievable amounts of comments to delete in the early-morning hours.

The problem here was the possibility, or even the likelihood, that readers would want to leave legitimate comments but would find that not possible, with the comments feature temporarily turned off. Those comments would quite likely then be lost, rather than saved for a later time when comments might be turned on. (I know that I, for one, wouldn’t bother to try again later to contribute if I was stymied the first time.) Well, I’ve upgraded the software now, and it seems that it once again is possible to leave comments on while still avoiding comment spam (knock wood).

Just wanted you to know. We now resume our regularly-scheduled (hah!) blog . . .

It has already been well-publicized that President Bush’s first foreign trip of his second term in office will be at the end of next month, an excursion to Europe. He’ll be starting off in Brussels, to try to start mending fences with those of America’s NATO allies who became somewhat estranged over the disagreement concerning the United States’ determination in spring of 2003 to Iraq with its “Coalition of the Willing.” That “Coalition,” you’ll recall, included nations (most notably Britain) which some think should have shown rather more solidarity on the question with their other EU brethren.

But the President’s engagement was supposed to have been preceded by an appearance by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the yearly Munich Security Conference (this year on 12-13 February). Now Rumsfeld has sent word that he won’t be coming, reports Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung (Rumsfeld Cancels Participation at Security Conference). (more…)

I’ve been away for a little while, lacking access to a reliable computer, and while I wasn’t looking it looks like the debate on immigration in France has taken an interesting new turn with the injection of the heavily-loaded word “quotas.” That happened last week Thursday, in a statement from the prominent French politician (and presumed future presidential candidate of the Right) Nicolas Sarkozy. But for all his presence in the current French political scene, these days Sarkozy has no policy-making role (he is instead president of the governing right-wing party, the UMP). When someone who does have such a role takes up the same chant, that’s when you know things are starting to get serious – especially when that someone is none other than the Interior Minister, and Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin let a meeting of legislators from the UMP party know earlier this week that his ministry has started work on a legislative proposal along the lines that Sarkozy had previously discussed, as reported in Le Monde (Dominique de Villepin Comes to Terms With the Idea of Quotas). The next element in this time-line looks to be a report his ministry will submit at the end of next month “containing its propositions on how to determine France’s needs for foreign workers.” (more…)

Traipsing through the Polish press lately, I found an interesting piece of commentary in Rzeczpospolita on The Spoiling of the Nobel Prize for Literature, by Waldemar Zyszkiewicz, a member of the Polish Writers’ Association. (You can read a history of that Association – in Polish – by following the link. It looks like yes, it was your standard Communist state writer’s union during most of the post-war period, but that its members offered quite a bit of resistance – and suffered quite a few arrests – during the Solidarity/martial law period of the 1980s.) You might recall my posting of not so long ago in which I commented on the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a contrast to the Nobel Peace Prize which was my principle object of discussion. It seems I was too optimistic even in my evaluation of the Literature Prize; according to Zyszkiewicz, the rot also set in there some time ago. (more…)

Now for a EuroSavant exclusive! OK, not an “exclusive” in a “reporter” sense, but rather in what we can perhaps call the “weblog” sense of telling you about a truly “exclusive” article that you wouldn’t have heard about otherwise – or, if you had, wouldn’t have been able to read, unless you happen to read Czech. The Czech Daily Právo has the scoop here: Wounded Nemcova Likely to Return From Asia Today. (Právo Newton registration required – yeah, it’s a huge pain.) (more…)

With the new year a new national defense law came into effect in the Czech Republic – one that marks a change from most such regimes in the Western world in that it no longer discriminates between the obligations of men and women. This development is tracked in a handful of articles in the Czech press – here, here, and here – which soon all started to sound rather alike to me, until I realized that they are basically the same article from CTK, the Czech News Agency! So take your pick, although the first article (from MFDnes) has the best photo of uniformed babes, if you’re into that sort of thing. (more…)

As if there weren’t enough troubles already in Iraq, another tribe there is now in revolt. And this is among folks who would ordinarily be among the last you would look to for such trouble, the “good guys,” so to speak. I’m talking here about the 1,350-strong contingent of Dutch soldiers stationed there, and that’s a direct quote from the head of their union, the AFMP, W. van den Burg: they’re in opstand, or “in revolt.” What that means in practical terms? Increasing talk about some sort of “strike action,” whatever that is supposed to look like in the middle of Iraq.

At least the Dutch still have military forces helping out there, as one-by-one other national contingents slip away (the Hungarians being the latest such). After I first came aware of this story and commenced my usual Dutch press-scanning for it, it turned out that most Netherlands dailies have declined to cover it, at least on-line. The exception is Allard Besse, of the Algemeen Dagblad and his article Soldiers in Iraq Grumble Over Money, but quite a good exception it is. (more…)

The UK has a new Freedom of Information Act. It used to be that you had to wait 30 years to get access to public documents, but now (or as of the beginning of the new year), in the words of Lady Ashton, the UK minister responsible for public records, “you will be able to request information and be given it as long as exemptions do not apply.” Those exemptions involve things you would expect, like national security or commercial secrets.

Now that access to public information in the UK has supposedly greatly widened, how are people taking advantage of that? The Guardian newspaper itself is pushing to get the legal advice given Tony Blair about whether Britain could join the United States in its attack on Iraq, according to international law, but indications are that request that will be blocked. And over Christmas, operatives of an opposition party, the Conservatives (these days it’s controversial whether they merit the label “the leading opposition party”), had great fun coming up with 120 “embarrassing questions” they want to pose to Tony Blair’s Labour government, i.e. to get information shedding further light on various awkward episodes in that government’s seven-year term in power such as its change-of-mind allowing a referendum on the EU Constitution when previously it had refused. (more…)

Back today to devastating tsunami flooding off the Indian Ocean, with hundreds of thousands dead. Wait: no, I’m not referring here to the tsunami flooding of Boxing Day, 2004. I’m referring to the cyclone-driven big waves that inundated Bangladesh back in 1991, killing around 135,000. You say you don’t remember that disaster? Well, that’s the point here: what makes you think that you’ll remember the Boxing Day 2004 tsunamis for very much longer as Time resumes its inexorable advance? You may be concerned and alarmed now, but who (or what) is to say that for most of the world’s population (except those who have suffered losses, of course) this event in short order will simply be relegated to some list of disasters chronicled on an obscure (and, perhaps, a bizarrely olive-drab-colored) webpage?

Yes, as US Navy helicopters and other assorted equipment finally start moving in aid to those in Sumatra, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, etc. who need it, some of those of us left behind here in the West, with little else left to do to help (presumably after giving money), have already taken up the intellectual exercise of trying to assess the likely place of the Boxing Day floods within the world’s historical memory. Here EuroSavant once again resorts to Denmark’s excellent commentary newspaper, Information, and specifically to Mette-Line Thorup’s recent article The Catastrophe’s Metaphysics. (more…)