William F. Buckley, Jr. died on Wednesday morning (EST), discovered as deceased by his writing desk in his Stamford, CT home by his cook. There’s no doubt that this marked the passing of a notable man, and there immediately followed the appropriate deluge of eulogies and appreciations from both the American Left and Right.

But what about beyond the borders? What, if anything, did Buckley mean to foreigners? You’d have to think that the sophistication of his speech, especially his vocabulary, made his writings and especially his Firing Line television program rather hard for the non-native-English speaker to digest. And God help any such person who appeared on Firing Line, at least any who had to face Buckley before the TV cameras without accompanying guests present to help carry any argument and take off some of the rhetorical heat. Being there one-and-one with Buckley would be like being in a duel, with your pea-shooter against the other guy’s submachine-gun. (more…)

The Lisbon Treaty – that’s the treaty on the reform of the European Union signed by all EU heads of government last December – is supposed to come into effect on January 1, 2009, providing that all EU member-states have ratified it by that time. Progress to that end so far has been pretty good, as Hungary, Malta, Slovenia, Romania, and France have already done so.

Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, Serge Halimi turns up as the skunk at the EU’s garden party. As he reminds us in an article entitled Simplified Democracy, with all this push for ratification there is still the little matter that the Lisbon Treaty will institute significant changes in the way the EU is run about which most European peoples will not get the opportunity they deserve to decide – namely by referenda. Even worse: a couple of European peoples have already had the chance to decide about these changes – and have rejected them! (more…)

For all the fuss about Fidel Castro resigning his post as Cuba’s “president” in favor of his brother Raúl, it all signifies very little when it comes to the hard realities of everyday Cuban life. (Indeed, many outside observers are of the opinion that the switch means very little difference in who is running the state, but that’s another subject entirely – let’s see if I can manage to pass along some of that commentary.) The US embargo and restrictions on travel there make it difficult for American sources to gain much background on conditions on the island, but this is a journalistic gap that Europeans are able and willing to step in and fill. Éric Landal of Libération does that today with an article, Havana: Capital of System D, and sub-titled “Cuba. Despite derisory salaries, people try to provide for their needs.” (more…)

You’ll recall that when the mass of rioters finally withdrew late Thursday night from the grounds of the US embassy in Belgrade, one thing they left behind was the charred body of someone whose interaction with one or more of the many fires set there, shall we say, had turned out unfortunate.

But who could it be? It seems the burns suffered made identification all the more difficult. Personnel accountability was rather easier to establish for embassy staff, and no one was missing there.

Now Le Figaro reports the ironic answer, confirmed by judicial sources in Belgrade: Belgrade: The Deceasd, A Kosovo Refugee. The victim was of course one of the invading rioters, namely 21 year-old Zoran Vujovic, studying at in Serbia’s second-largest city of Novi Sad, but who had previously fled Kosovo with his family. Police had only been made aware that he was missing after he failed to return to Novi Sad on Friday from the demonstration.

Calling all intelligence test devotees! You think you’re pretty good? Are you up for a new challenge? How about an IQ test in Czech? Mladá fronta dnes offers you one here.

Actually, it shouldn’t be that intimidating. Of course you’re wondering what question one is all about: all that explanatory text and then only one choice for an answer, labeled “START.” What that’s about, is that you get 52 points (out of a possible maximum of 142) for free, just by checking that box. They need to do that to calibrate the test, it seems; the final score you get in the end should correspond to the real IQ it reflects.

Going on: Really, you should give this a shot, it’s often easy to understand the questions – which are often expressed numerically – and then it’s often easy to answer. For example, question 4 should be clear: what is the next number that belongs in the series “16 – 34 – 70 – 142 – 286 – ?” Anyway, good luck.

Hey, at Guantanamo Bay they’ve been able to get useful information out of the detainees! So reports the Belgian Dutch-language newspaper Het Nieuwsblad: “GUANTANAMO BAY – Interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have elicited useful information from detainees. Not by mistreating them, but simply by asking questions. So says former interrogator Paul Rester.”

The rest of the brief article has mostly to do with various other pronouncements from Rester. The very next paragraph is great: Rester complains that his profession has gained a bad reputation due to all the reports about the CIA mistreating detainees in various secret prisons. “His work is little appreciated by the public and that sticks in Rester’s craw.” (more…)

Hold on: that’s Tariq bin Laden, Osama’s older brother. The French newsmagazine Le Figaro reports that that Bin Laden intends to invest 50 billion dollars in a “tourist village” on the Algerian coast designed to attract European retirees to go there to spend some time on the Mediterranean Sea, in the Mediterranean sun. You’ll surely recall how the Bin Laden family was, and continues to be, one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, having made their fortune mainly in construction. Yes, it will be a luxury project, with private clubs and of course medical installations of high standard. The settlement, called “Nour” (“light” in Arabic) will cover an extensive 1,500 square kilometers.

Ever heard of the term “ostalgia”? More accurately, it’s spelled ostalgie because it’s a German word, basically meaning “nostalgia for the Ost,” that is, for the old East Germany. Citizens of that erstwhile DDR (German Democratic Republic) had sky-high hopes for their lives once the Wall was torn down and the DDR was folded into what was West Germany; inevitably, those hopes were to a lesser or greater extent disappointed, leading some to pine back for the “good old days” of German socialism in the Eastern third of the country.

You surely didn’t much notice if you are not yourself German, but two weeks back from last Sunday (on 27 January) local elections were held in the (West) German states of Hesse and Lower Saxony. In the latter state, whose capital is Hannover, it is fair to say that “ostalgie” won a seat in the state parliament – and how! The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports on the rise of one Christel Wegner, a trained nurse of some sixty years of age, but also a founding member of the German Communist Party (DKP – Deutsche Kommunistische Partei). Now, it’s not as if she owes her new seat in the Lower Saxon parliament to being directly elected to the position – it doesn’t work that way in the German political system. Rather, the different parties make up their own lists of candidates, and how far down the list you go in giving the candidates seats in the new parliament is a function of how many votes that party receives in the election. Although formally of the DKP, Wegner was nonetheless taken up on the electoral list of the party that calls itself The Left (Die Linke), that did rather better than usual in the 27 January elections. And so Christel Wegner is going to Hannover.

What’s the problem? you may ask. (more…)

The website of the mass-circulation Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes reports today that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is scheduled to pay a two-day visit to Iraq starting on 2 March. It will be the very first visit ever to Iraq by the president of the Islamic Republic (which, however, has only existed since 1979). Ahmadinejad was invited there by the Iraqi president, the Kurd Jalal Talabani. The Mladá fronta dnes article – without a byline; it seems it derives to a large degree from reports from the Czech news agency CTK – claims that the US supports the vist as a means to improve Iranian-Iraqi relations. At the same time, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe called on Iran to cease its alleged support for “extremists in Iraq.”

NATO these days is undergoing somewhat of a crisis, having to do with the Alliance’s efforts in Afghanistan. Officials from the various NATO lands will deny it, but recent developments in Afghanistan itself have been further shaped and amplified through a serious of previously-planned security conferences to produce some serious tensions.

It seems some NATO alliance partners are rather unimpressed with the level of contribution offered by certain others, and are ratcheting up the pressure on these laggards to get more with the program. This argument dominated the NATO conference of defense ministers held last week in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. As you can expect, the US is the leading country among that first group, but Canada has been complaining as well. That country currently has 2,500 troops stationed in dangerous southern Afghanistan, by Kandahar, and has even threatened to send those troops home once its current commitment comes to an end if there are no new troop commitments to southern Afghanistan from other NATO allies. (more…)

Did you know that there is a search engine out there that is superior to Google? And that Microsoft will shortly purchase it? Obviously, all of this is important in the context of the take-over bid for Yahoo! that Microsoft announced just over week ago, a move that was widely interpreted as being a challenge to Google. Peter Buhr, writing in Die Zeit (Pincer-Attack on Google), sheds some light on what could be one important aspect of the proposed deal that I haven’t seen any coverage of in any English-language forum.

You can actually try out this other search engine for yourself to see what you think: it’s at AlltheWeb, and happens to be owned by Yahoo!, having first been sold to Overture in 2003 whereupon Overture itself was sold to Yahoo! in 2004. According to Buhr, the main problem that has held AlltheWeb back from greater public acceptance has simply been marketing – people never knew about it because PR has never been a specialty of the engineers there. (more…)

“Whomever US citizens may choose: Europeans will wake up next year on a cold January morning – and find before them a government whose foreign policy decisions, although presented in new clothes, will appear almost like those customary to Bush.” That is the conclusion German-language readers of Spiegel Online get to digest today, in an article entitled Bush Leaves – His Foreign Policy Stays.

Crucially, though, take a look at who is the author: it is a certain Peter Ross Range, whose credentials are given in a short sidebar on the article’s first page: long-time Time magazine foreign correspondent, then editor-in-chief of Blueprint, the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council – in short, in all probability an American. That means this article is intended to be a warning from the west side of the Atlantic to the east, not to expect much to change in US policy with the next administration. (more…)

Next Monday, 11 February, is promising to be quite an eventful day on the Gazprom front – that’s of course the gigantic Russan natural gas company, the largest extractor of natural gas in the world, of which the Russian government owns a majority stake. On the one hand, it’s the same-old same-old, what we’ve all seen before, for Monday is the day that Russia, speaking for Gazprom, will cut off all natural gas supplies to the Ukraine due to alleged non-payment by the latter of $1.5 billion. Curiously, Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko has been scheduled for some time to arrive in Moscow for a visit on Tuesday. At least he’ll be glad to be away from his native country and someplace instead where it’s actually warm inside the buildings, though one can imagine that the diplomatic talks he will engage in might still be rather frosty.

But that is all par for the course for a European winter; I can remember recently thinking to myself “Hmm, it’s already February – shouldn’t we have had the regularly-scheduled Russian energy cut-off crisis by now?” More interesting is that next Monday is also the evening of the going-away concert in honor of Dimitri Medvedev – Gazprom chairman now, but Vladimir Putin’s “recommended” candidate for president of the Russian Federation at the upcoming March 2 elections, and therefore also a shoo-in as the next Russian president. The concert will be headlined by the legendary English rock-n-roll band Deep Purple, and this was recently commented upon in the New York Time’s weblog “The Lede: Notes on the News,” by Mike Nizza, who notes that Putin himself will surely be present as well. (more…)

The animal-rights activists are up in arms again. As the French-language Belgian newspaper Le Soir reports, this time the targets of their ire are the the snake-men of Marrakesh, of that city’s Jemaa el-Fna [sic] Square. More specifically, it’s the Montpellier, France-based GEOS (Groupe d’Etudes et d’Observation pour la Sauvegarde des animaux savages) that is raising a ruckus, not against any sort of bio-engineered hybrid snake/men, but rather against those Moroccan snake-charmers. They are accused of mishandling their reptiles; the international appeal from the GEOS reads “Tourists, turn away from the unworthy spectacle of these mistreated animals, or even better go to express your indignation to the police-office near Jama el-Fina Square!” And hey, as of this morning (Friday, 8 Feb.) their petition already numbers more than 200 signatures!

Psssst Hey pal. Yeah – you! Things getting a little cool with the old lady? Been wondering lately just where is that ol’ loving feeling? Tell me this: has she let you know that she’ll be out this coming Saturday afternoon (9 February), doing some shopping or getting together with her girlfriends, or for somesuch other reason? She has? And do you live anywhere near Utrecht (that famous old city in the Netherlands)? My friend, I’ve got to give it to you straight: your wife/partner/significant other will probably be on her way then straight to the Divorce Fair scheduled for that day in Utrecht’s convention hall, the Jaarbeurs. (more…)

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama gained yet another endorsement from a politician on Tuesday – yes, not just any “Tuesday” but on SuperDuper Tuesday. What is more, the endorsement was pronounced right in the middle of the day when primary voters were supposed to head to their local polls to vote.

But that was because this time, as the newspaper Het Parool reports, the endorsement came from Dutch Finance Minister and senior Labor Party figure Wouter Bos, who called Obama “the most inspiring” of the various American candidates in the regular weekly appearance he makes on an evening program of Holland’s “RTL Z” channel. (Early evening program Central European Time, but six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time: thus, endorsement pronounced around noon/early afternoon in the US, depending on where you are.) (more…)

Has the on-going soap opera that is the personal life of the French president finally started rubbing you the wrong way, too? I mean, you can only gape at the stark contrast Nicolas Sarkozy presents to the conduct of his predecessor. I’m hardly trying to say that Jacques Chirac was any model of personal rectitude, but at least he tried to keep his own little transgressions (which apparently were of a financial nature) out of the public eye.

Now the French newspaper Libération reports that unease over the president’s conduct is starting to be reflected at high levels in the government. Specifically, Jean-Louis Debré, president of the Conseil constitutionnel (the Constitutional Council: an official body of “wise men” – and women – who advise the government on the constituionality of most laws before they can actually go in to effect) let slip the opinion last Sunday that “there was a certain behavior that was expected” of the French president, and that “one should take care not to desecrate official functions.” (more…)

Is he still around? Yes, he is: Helmut Schmidt, German Bundeskanzler from 1974 to 1982. Famous for his no-nonsense personality (but, after all, in his youth he was heavily involved in the Wehrmacht throughout the Second World War, including two years serving on the Russian Front), he was in particular the scourge of President Jimmy Carter, who felt the full glare of his teutonic disdain for not being quite as ready to face down the Soviets across the inter-German border in as hard-core a fashion as he. Yes, Ronald Reagan turned out much more to his taste, but alas, he only had about a year-and-a-half to enjoy the Gipper: he lost his majority in the Bundestag on 1 October 1982 and so had to yield his office to Helmut Kohl of the opposition CDU party.

But you could always count on the fact that Helmut Schmidt would land in the private sector on his feet, and in fact from 1983 through today he has been a co-publisher of the well-respected (certainly by this weblog) Hamburg-based opinion weekly Die Zeit. In that capacity – and, really, as among the most éminent of the German intellectual and political éminences grises – it’s only natural that he occasionally grab the podium offered him by his publication to hold forth on some important contemporary development. This time – on a weekend that is just before Super Tuesday, you’ll remember – the German-reading public is treated to a piece by Schmidt titled Liebe Amerikaner (“Dear Americans”), and sub-titled was kann die Welt von euch erwarten? – “what can the world expect from you?” (more…)

Former long-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, all of 81 years, is still around, and you can be sure that he has some interesting things to say about the sub-prime-inspired financial troubles making all the headlines these days. The leading German opinion-weekly Die Zeit recently caught up with him for a brief interview published as Die große Ironie des Erfolgs – whose English version is also accessible as The great irony of success. (The “English version,” if you think about it, is properly the “original,” since I’m not aware that Greenspan speaks German.) (more…)

Wow! Did you know that Arianna Huffington has managed to get a syndicated gig for her Huffington Post collective weblog in the German press, specifically on Focus Online!

Naturally, upon making this discovery the next thing I wanted to do was check to see the quality of the translation, i.e. how close the correspondence was between what you’ll read in the original English version and what German readers see. (more…)