This has been a very “Obama” week, with its highlight the State of the Union speech, delivered against a challenging backdrop of the loss of the Senate seat in Massachusetts and the resulting fears for the failure of the health care reform legislation. As he has done repeatedly in the past, by all accounts the President pulled off a superb performance before the joint Houses of Congress last Wednesday evening – although of course what really matters for Americans is the policy results he goes on to achieve, if any.

What with all this current drama about Obama under pressure, it’s curious to see some contrarian media pieces about him now starting to appear in the foreign press – “contrarian” in the sense of reacting sharply to the “Obama myth” by making instead the point “just what’s so special about this guy, anyway?” One of these is “Opposing Obama,” a broadcast on the BBC World Service in which Guardian journalist Gary Younge (who is British and black) tours the US finding people “who think Barack Obama’s presidency is nothing but bad news.” Anybody interested should be able to click on the above link starting tomorrow (1 February 2010) and hear the program, or just hear it as it is periodically scheduled on the BBC World Service broadcast itself (listenable on-line, of course), starting tomorrow at 5.05 hours Eastern Standard Time.

Then there is also the recent article on the website of Cicero, the German-language “Magazine for Political Culture,” entitled Man Without Qualities (a title which is identical to, and therefore presumably some sort of a reference to, the highly-acclaimed (although very long, and unfinished) 1930s novel Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil). Here, Leon de Winter takes Obama thoroughly to the cleaners:

• First of all, the only reason Barack Obama got elected president in the first place is race, pure and simple. Although handsome and well-spoken, he didn’t really accomplish much in the US Senate during his limited years there, so it wasn’t really a matter of being most-qualified. Rather, he managed to come under the wing of David Axelrod, the Chicago-based political consultant and expert in promoting black candidates (as he had done already in getting Deval Patrick elected as the first-ever black governor of Massachusetts). Axelrod managed to make Obama’s election as president inevitable, by turning it into a sort of cleansing ritual, both of America’s troubled racial history and of the unhappy previous two terms of George W. Bush.
  
• For that matter, Obama is also simply a creation of the Chicago political machine (of which Axelrod is an important component part). He’s just a machine politician, and continues to kow-tow to the head of that machine, Chicago mayor Richard Daley – that’s the only reason why he went to Copenhagen back last October in the first place, to try to sell the International Olympic Committee on bestowing the 2016 Summer Games (and the huge pay-off they represent) to Daley’s city.
  
• For that matter, De Winter claims, if Obama is not some sort of leftist radical now, there is plenty of evidence that he was one such during his early adulthood, the formative years for his political views. Why is it, he asks, that the President has been unwilling to release academic transcripts or any of the papers he wrote while he was an undergraduate at Columbia and Occidental College. Ah yes, Columbia, where he ultimately received his B.A. in 1983: that was the home of, among other leftist professors, the radical pro-Palestinian Edward Said. Who knows to what degree Obama’s thought could have been infected there by such professors as that?
  
• Ultimately, though (and ironically), Barack Obama is really not black at all. Only one of his parents was black, of course, and he was Kenyan, and so not a black American coming from out of the heritage of slavery and Jim Crow. So he doesn’t really count as a black man, although that point has obviously gone straight over the head of the vast majority of the American electorate.

There you have it. And who is this Leon de Winter? He’s a Dutch novelist and film-maker of some sort of renown in the Benelux and Germany, from an orthodox Jewish family, who currently spends a good part of his time living in Los Angeles. So he presumably has all the access he needs to become as sharp an observer of American affairs as he wants take the time to become – indeed his Wikipedia entry alleges that a couple of years ago he was considering taking his family to live in the US permanently. So he’s an “Americanophile” – and, since he’s European, you’d also expect him to be well under Obama’s spell. Clearly, he’s not, but he also would seem to have no particular axe to grind about the President either.

Right after that hit SOTU speech, we also found out (or were reminded) that Obama does know his policy and is a master of debate, even if that is against 200+ Republican members of the US Congress, all at once. (The video of that recent encounter at a hotel in Baltimore is here.) And clearly many of the claims being made against the president (“socialist,” “not born in the USA,” etc.) are way off-base. But it just might be useful, on occasion, to be exposed to something deviating from the usual hero-worship, especially if it comes from a source with no apparent inherent bias.

Hope you’ll forgive me for going off-(blog)topic here. The last time I visited the US, one task on my list was to go to a doctor’s office to get a physical check-up. But the way the receptionist answering the phone at the first place I called went immediately and without invitation into a long introductory spiel about which insurance schemes they accepted and which they didn’t (I was a foreigner: I was simply ready to pay cash) put me off so, that I gave up on the whole idea.

Now we read on-line in the New York Times (Cost Dispute Halts Airlift of Injured Haiti Quake Victims) how US authorities have stopped evacuations of critically-injured Haitian earthquake victims to American hospitals because of a dispute about who will pay for their care. One doctor in charge of a nonprofit foundation assisting in Haitian relief efforts is quoted as calling this delay potentially catastrophic for these sufferers.

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you: Health Care Provision – American style! Cut out this crap: Send them on to Canada, or else over to France, where I am (sincerely) sure they will gladly be attended to properly.

But wait – who’s gonna pay for the extra fuel and aircraft wear-and-tear involved in diverting the medevac flights that way? Well, I’m sure there are some French planes there at Port-au-Prince as well, or could be if the American authorities in charge of the airport will allow them to land.

UPDATE: A subsequent NYT article of Sunday, 31 January 2010 now states that the primary reason American medevac flights from Haiti were suspended is because US facilities for treating these patients – mainly in Florida – were simply being overwhelmed. Nevertheless, it does mention Florida governor Charlie Crist mentioning specific financial considerations in a letter he wrote about the situation to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

Another interesting bit came up today on the site of the Dutch newspaper Trouw: Second-hand smoke is also harmful to the smoker. (I do like these miniscule on-line pieces from Trouw, that nevertheless usually manage to communicate a well-defined, thought-provoking point. This sort of material helps this blog to move closer to the aggregation function that has been suggested for it.)

Basically, while the health risks of second-hand smoke for non-smokers in the same general vicinity have been subject to exhaustive investigation, the impact of that smoke on the smokers who were emitting it in the first place has been neglected, on the assumption that they had enough health problems just taking into account their direct puffing. But no! A smoker may think he has smoked, say, fourteen cigarettes on a given evening – because he sees fourteen butts in the ashtray – but in reality the harmful effect on him is on the order of 16.6 cigarettes, precisely because of the second-hand smoke he created but then breathed in again.

This is out of a study from the (Italian) National Institute for Cancer Research, where they conducted their research on smoking newstand kiosk-owners, who sit there most of the day just smoking by themselves. But mathematicians out there will justifiably wonder whether 16.6 in that particular case is really the final figure, or whether it is instead even higher. After all, that second-hand smoke that you breathe in you then exhale again (making it third-hand smoke), which then you partially breathe in again, etc. etc. This sounds to me like an infinite sequence problem! (Which, as any good mathematician can tell you, under certain conditions will still yield a non-infinite, final answer.)

Since last September, relations between fellow EU-members (and NATO allies; but also with a very troubled historical relationship) Slovakia and Hungary have been rather bad, due to a Language Law that took effect then in Slovakia mandating the use of Slovak in all communications with any government organizations – the only exception being within those localities where people speaking other languages constitute 20% or more of the population. In Slovakia, that can really only be Hungarians, and it’s true that in some places they do reach that 20% threshold, but not many. And if you try to communicate with a language other than Slovak in those many other places where you’re not allowed to, you can get hit with a fine – up to €5,000!

One excellent window onto this controversy is the main Czech business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny, which now has an article on the latest development: Bratislava is in a rage: Budapest to contribute to countrymen in Slovakia towards fines for Hungarian. Put simply: the Hungarian government is raising a fund of money – mainly from its own resources, although private contributions are also encouraged – to pay the fines and legal costs for Hungarian-nationals in Slovakia that run afoul of that Language Law. Even though those that do so will by definition be Slovak citizens, although of Hungarian ethnic nationality. The Slovak Minister of Culture Jozef Bednár has issued a statement condemning Hungary for “intervening in the internal affairs of the Slovak Republic.” That does seem to be an accurate accusation, as far as it goes, although on the other hand it was also the standard line trotted out by the Soviet Union and its satellites whenever the West chose to complain about human rights violations and the like in those countries while the Cold War was still raging

Indeed, you could think that a bit of “interference in internal affairs” is quite in order here to stifle this childish and embarrassing brouhaha – intervention not from Hungary, but the European Union. Yet it seems that neither the doctrine concerning relations between EU institutions and member-states nor the sheer willingness of EU top officials to actually do anything has evolved sufficiently for that to happen.

Things really get interesting towards the end of the HN article when the author (the piece is attributed only to the Czech press agency CTK) introduces secondary information – like only entities registered as organizations or businesses are liable to the fine, not physical persons. Or the fact that no entity has actually been fined yet! If that’s really true, you can safely guess that the Language Law was really intended to be little more than a Slovak political gesture. Unfortunately, that gesture is kicking up more than a bit of trouble with the neighbors.

No joke, this – at least the report comes from the respected Dutch newspaper Trouw, not known for putting out spoof articles. The lede:

Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has called upon the world to boycott American goods and the dollar, because the US and other Western lands, according to him, are guilty of global warming. That is on a tape-recording that the television station Al-Jazeera played on Friday [today].

Yes, according to Osama the US economy must be brought to a halt if global warming is to be stopped. You’ll admit he is starting to get a bit more innovative now with his propaganda angles, what with this new “green” direction – although you should also keep in mind that the authenticity of this latest alleged cave-missive has not yet been verified.

UPDATE: Renowned Middle East blogger Prof. Juan Cole accepts that that latest Bin Laden message is for real, and in an extended blogpost highlights the Saudi fugitive’s hypocrisy, detailing how “[g]lobal terrorism is a high-carbon activity and very bad for the environment, not to mention humans and other living things.” (Some of you of proper age will hear in his word-choice a distinctive 1960s-echo that surely could not have gone unintended.)

John Lennon, thirty years ago; surprise Scottish pop sensation Susan Boyle next, i.e. to be shot down by some crazed fan? That’s what her family are worried about, specifically her brother John, after Susan returned to her council-flat home one evening earlier this week to encounter a young intruder rummaging around inside.

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!)

President Obama faced a hard challenge with his State of the Union address to Congress of yesterday evening, given his recent series of political setbacks. That his speech came off well nonetheless is not just the conclusion picked by post-speech polling, but also one shared by observers from the French press, despite the discourse’s inevitable emphasis on domestic affairs. (This US-focus did not stop the French on-line papers from uniformly offering embedded videos of the entire speech, some even dubbed into French, so their readers could take a look at it themselves.)

Noteworthy reaction flowed promptly in two articles from that pillar of the French journalistic establishment, Le Monde. One of them (Obama’s words: work, economy, and Americans; no byline) literally offers at its head a “word-cloud” of the speech’s most-frequent terms (actually, their French equivalents) and then, by way of analysis, a hyper-short summary of his essential message: “Don’t panic.” Yes, it’s true that the president’s emphasis was much more on the economy and creating jobs, rather than on that health care reform legislation that still sits tantalizingly close to final passage. But what was of far more interest to Le Monde’s writer here was those foreign policy topics to which Obama gave short shrift, as he only briefly discussed Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, skimmed China, Russia, Germany, India, the Koreas, and said nothing at all about Pakistan or the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process! (Nor about France, come to think of it.)

A companion Le Monde article (Obama like in the first days; also no explicit byline) notes how surprisingly sprightly Obama appeared before the assembled Congress (“with a rediscovered insolence and combativeness”), just like in the old days, oh so long ago, when he was eating John McCain’s lunch on the campaign trail. This writer also issues a fitting, if cynical summary of the president’s economic message: focus on jobs this year (an election year); focus on reducing the deficit only the year after that.

For its part, the conservative paper Le Figaro contributes a lengthy review of Obama’s SOTU speech from its Washington correspondent, Laure Mandeville (Employment, Obama’s priority for 2010). I’m pretty sure “Laure” is a French woman’s name, for Ms. Mandeville not only mentions Barack’s feistiness (“more resolute and offensive than ever”) but also gets in a reference to Michelle’s couture (she was wearing a jupe bouffant violine – some sort of fancy skirt). At the same time, she captures well the lecturing, lightly-scolding tone prevalent especially in his speech’s second half, and directed largely at the Republican opposition, reflecting his greater theme of “we [i.e. the country] just can’t go on like this!”

Bonus: The judgment on Obama’s SOTU speech is also out from the foremost Danish expert on American affairs, Prof. Niels Bjerre-Poulsen of the Copenhagen Business School (as reported by Ritzau, so it’s pretty much the representative Danish journalistic view; actually published in this instance in the opinion newspaper Information). With this excellent speech, opines the good professor, Obama once again showed his strong side to the nation: that is, in speech-making, in this case in a tight situation and with many contradictory points to make. But the resulting goodwill will only last so long, and it takes much different political skills to translate such fancy words into concrete results. We still have to see if the president is similarly gifted with those latter.

I’m not that much into crime novels myself, but for a long while it has been difficult for anyone interested in literature generally to remain unaware of the name of Stieg Larsson (pictured left), the Swedish author who died a few years ago (in 2004, to be precise) but whose posthumous fictional works have been a tremendous success throughout the world, topping European fiction sales in 2009, for example. Inevitably, a movie based on one book from his so-called Millenium Trilogy will be out in the Spring, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which was actually titled Men Who Hate Women when his works were first published in Swedish back in 2005).

Ah – but were they his works? Did he really write them? Doubt about his whole literary output is now cropping up in the Scandinavian press, such as in an article by Uffe Christensen on kpn.dk (“Allegation: Larsson could not write”), the on-line culture pages of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper. “Could not write”: Note well that this does not reflect some mere aesthetic judgment (as in “Really, old chap, in the final analysis James Joyce just could not write!”). Rather, these are assertions that Larsson simply did not have the minimal command of the Swedish language to have written “his” fiction himself.

The main claim comes from Anders Hellberg, now a journalist at the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, but formerly a close colleague of Larsson’s at the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå. (Larsson worked mainly as a graphic designer there, but also was editor – and, supposedly, a writer – for various other science fiction and Trotskyite journals.) Says Hellberg: “The Millenium-author Stieg Larsson was a master of research, but a poor reporter. One can suspect that his significant-other [DK: samlever] Eva Gabrielsson had an active role in his authorship.” Plus, he had poor handwriting, could not spell, and had a shaky grasp of grammar.

Hellberg is willing to state flatly that Larsson could not have written his works himself. And this judgment is seconded by one Kurdo Baksi, who is currently writing a biography of Larsson and who also tells the Dagens Nyheter, “It has always been a riddle to me how he could have written these books.” But what about Ms. Gabrielsson herself? She stands by her (deceased) man:

What is in the Millenium Trilogy Stieg wrote. I read the proofs and had discussions with Stieg. But I did not intervene to write anything myself. That would have been like taking the brush from a great painter.”

Maybe even if it turns out that she did have a rather greater role in helping him write than she is willing to admit, it won’t turn out to be that big a deal. Larsson no longer walks among us, anyway. But if somehow it does, remember: unless you regularly read Danish or Swedish, you probably heard about it here first!

“The Prez & I”? “Obamamia”? Actually, the musical about Barack Obama that opened on Sunday at the Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt, Germany, is called “Hope – The Obama Musical Story.”

The hat-tip for the one noticing this first must go to Jillian Rayfield, affiliated with Talking Points Memo, and then just yesterday David Kurtz from the same site posted a slide-show on the subject. But I soon found my way to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the German- and English-language website belonging to the musical itself. Check it out: there’s some good information there, even if the English version is written by someone not in complete control of that language and with a fondness for the phrase inter alia (actually a Latin expression, for all you non-lawyers out there, meaning “among others”). The songs that make up the show will surely become hits, it says there, for “[e]xperts of the German music scene” are sure they have that “Earth Wind and Fire [sic] quality”! Even more intriguingly, we learn that “Hope” is the first “interactive musical,” during which most of the audience will sit on cubes (called “percussion chairs”) that double as instruments and so will be encouraged to drum (and even get up off those chairs to dance) along with the performers! Wow!

Right, so how have the reviews been so far? Of the two I can find, the one from the home-town paper the Frankfurter Rundschau (Border of Gaiety) cannot truly be regarded as independent, since the musical’s producers announce right on their site’s “News” page that the FR is a “mediapartner.” Yes, Barack Obama’s story (and a parallel plot-line about the troubles of a South Chicago community) does turn out to be a suitable subject for a musical, opines reviewer Judith von Sternburg, even though back in the real world, after a whole year in office, ugly Reality has already caught up with the President. Von Sternburg is independent-minded enough to label Hillary Clinton’s portrayal (performed by American actress and “Evita” veteran Tracy Plester, who needs only a quick wardrobe-and-wig-change to render Sarah Palin as well) as “a caricature.” Van Sternburg also manages to pick up on, and mention in her piece, the line spoken by the actor representing a son fighting in Iraq, who comes back home just as Obama is elected and declares that surely the war will soon be over now – something the stage-side English-to-German translator at the premier performance skips.

The other review is from the Financial Times Deutschland (Out of Office: Obama Mia!), by Willy Theobald, who it emerges did not attend the actual premier but rather a previous dress-rehearsal. At least that enabled him also to grab an interview with the show’s producer and director, Roberto Emmanuele, who declares to him “Musicals I generally find boring” – as indeed does Herr Theobald – but “I want to make a musical that is fresher [knackiger] and more innovative than all the others.” He goes on: “Our music has quite a lot of hit-potential,” and Theobald does admit that he finds many of the songs “rather infectious” (richtig mitreißend). In the end, the FTD reviewer gives those behind “Hope” a lot of credit, although he can’t resist wondering whether the work will soon need to add another act at the end – one about Yemen.

The verdicts so far out of Germany, then – as few as they are – seem largely positive. Is it perhaps time to go on-line to order your tickets as well as a round-trip flight to Frankfurt-am-Main? Here’s a final YouTube tidbit to help you make your decision:

As those of us keeping track of such things know, the mild, non-binding agreement that emerged out of last month’s COP15 UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen was disappointing to many. Just imagine how much it fell short of the expectations of those island countries, like the Maldives, whose very existence is threatened by the rising sea-levels global warming brings!

But now one of those island nations, the Federated States of Micronesia (that’s who you turn to for your “.fm” Internet domain), has found a novel way to do something about it. I first caught word of this from the Some Assembly Required blog, which provided a link to an article in the New York Times sourced to Reuters (so it must be true, eh?). There you can read all about it: The Micronesia government is trying to intervene to influence the re-commissioning of a coal-fired power plant – one located in Prunéřov, Czech Republic, or around 13,000 km away! It has expressed this intention in two official government-to-government letters, one sent last month (while the Copenhagen conference was going on, apparently), and the second (laying out the technical details of what it objects to in the plant) just last week.

I’ve been able to find Czech-press coverage of this rather extraordinary episode only in that country’s main business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny. But that coverage is pretty thorough. There is a main article, telling the story: Micronesia: Prunéřov is [just] one of a thousand power plants, but it still is damaging us. In addition HN has an exclusive interview in a second piece (conducted by an unnamed reporter) with Andrew Yatilman, Minister of the Environment for Micronesia (We are fighting for our lives, Prunéřov is just our first act, says Micronesian minister).

Actually, in contrast to the impression of cool rage that that headline might give you, you’re really struck much more in the interview by how ad hoc this effort is on the part of the Micronesian government – how they are feeling their way as they go along in this legal initiative without precedent. For instance, Greenpeace (as you might expect) has had a big influence in this whole thing: it was protests carried out in front of the Prunéřov plant in question by Czech Greenpeace activists last month that inspired the idea in the first place, and Greenpeace has cooperated closely with the Micronesian government in providing both legal and technical advice. Will you be trying this with other plants, other governments? asks the reporter. For sure, Yatilman replies, although only after this episode is over and we have a chance to learn from the experience. (Note well that Micronesia is not going so far as to demand that the Czech government shut down the plant, it is only asking to be included in the process for granting it approval to re-open, so it can insist on a range of anti-CO2 emission safeguards.) Are any other island nations ready to join you in these efforts? I don’t know yet, Yatilman replies.

The interview concludes with a bit of unwitting comedy, as the HN reporter inquires whether Minister Yatilman is aware of the attitudes towards global warming of the Czech President, Václav Klaus. He is not; HN informs him how Klaus denies that global warming even exists, that he’s one of the world’s most-prominent climate change deniers. “Good that you say that,” replies Yatilman,

because we got a letter from the Czech Republic that purported to be from the president. But we didn’t really believe that. It wasn’t written on any letterhead stationery and it tried to find out why we were doing what we are doing. As if we weren’t a sovereign state. Underneath was some signature, but whether it was from your president, I don’t know. In any case we didn’t take it seriously.

Don’t look now, but the controversy of the Danish Mohammed cartoons has sprung back to life. This time it’s in Norway, where last week the newspaper Aftenposten decided to republish the twelve controversial drawings – not out of any idle curiosity as to what would happen next, but as a sort of tribute to the Dane Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonists originally involved and the lightning-rod for the entire group who you might remember was the subject of an attempted assault on his home back on New Year’s Day. (This is reported by Jens Ehlers in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten – Has Norway gotten its own Mohammed-crisis? – which, appropriately enough, was the one to originally publish the cartoons, and which still pays Westergaard for his work.)

Of course, no curiosity is needed as to what happened next: the Pakistani Foreign Ministry condemned the newspaper’s action, and demonstrators materialized in the Pakistani city Lahore, burning Norwegian flags. But this time, according to Ehlers, they numbered only a “two-figured number of persons,” i.e. in the tens. The editor-in-chief of the Norwegian paper, Hilde Haugsgjerd, was not particularly upset at seeing her country’s colors go up in smoke (then again, I think few Norwegians would be, just because they are laid-back): “They should have their freedom-of-expression in the same way that we have our freedom-of-expression. That doesn’t change anything in our judgment.”

Nor should it. Frankly, the cartoons should really published anew on a regular schedule, not just in reaction to some new event. Yes, they are supposedly insulting to some aspect of Islam, but by this point they could be a key symbol of Western-style freedom-of-expression, one of our fundamental freedoms, which holds that anything and everything should be allowed to be ridiculed, and if anyone doesn’t like that, then that’s just too bad. Remember that the reason the Jyllands-Posten editor decided to commission and print them in the first place back in late 2005 was his fear that implicit threats of violence were leading to de facto self-censorship of any writings or drawings concerning Islam, in effect a creeping, furtive denial of that freedom-of-expression. It’s to fight that sort of craven self-denial, by means of clear, repeated examples of refusing to be intimidated, that I feel these cartoons should be republished on a regular basis.

(And is there no aesthetic consciousness out there in the Muslim world – somewhere? anywhere? – that would interpret a rendering of Mohammed’s head fused with traditional Islamic half-moon-and-star iconography as a clever piece of art, as even a tribute and compliment to the Prophet and those who follow his teachings?)

Four days on, and most of the world’s attention is still focused on the earthquake-disaster in Haiti. You’ll get no complaint about that out of me, and in fact I’ve finally come up with some things to pass on here that you might find interesting. Keep in mind, though, that I try only to do so when it’s material you probably have not encountered through the English-language press. Often, as here, that means it offers an unconventional, even perverse perspective.

For instance: Brazil is another country ready to assist the Haitians in their hour of need, as you would expect. But in Brazil’s case it is the Ministry of Defense that is taking the lead, as the Dutch newspaper Trouw reports: Brazil sends weapons to Haiti. Weapons? For sure: because people are getting so desperate there by this point that there is the very real threat of a complete break-down of public order, so the place stands sorely in need of some guns that shoot rubber bullets, and other crowd-control armaments.

We can see that from yet another Dutch report, this time from the Algemeen Dagblad: Dutch [team] break off rescue-attempt after gunshots. A Dutch “rescue-brigade” of four ten-man teams (and their dogs) specialized in finding and rescuing people from rubble is finally in Port-au-Prince, but they had to stop their first efforts to rescue people under a collapsed bank after gunfire came ever-closer, and now coordinate with local UN officials for an armed escort. And by the way, it’s a Brazilian who is in command of all UN troops in the country, many of which are Brazilian.

Then there is a rather controversial opinion piece placed today in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique: Are blacks incapable? It’s quite interesting that I can’t find the author’s name anywhere on that webpage, although it does seem he is of African origin himself, as he writes of his “brothers of color” and how they are sure to let him know how they don’t like what he is saying. His lede is brief: “Haitians’ liberty has served for nothing but bringing forth tyrannical regimes.” The situation there is catastrophic now – but it was catastrophic even before the earthquake struck. Much the same applies to the countries of Africa, he writes, still trapped in backwardness and poverty, as they have been for decades since the departure of the colonial authorities. (Also, their own silence now when it comes to offering help of their own to Haiti has been deafening.) The mysterious editorialist attributes this state-of-affairs to black culture, for while all human beings have the same capacity for intelligence, the more “emotional” black outlook on life looks always for a strongman to take charge, and ultimately does not care about the corruption and elites-creation that must ensue. As a result, “we must have the courage to affirm that our culture does not favor [economic] development, it is indeed antagonistic to development.”

A low blow during Haiti’s time of Calvary? Or strong words whose uttering is made all-the-more necessary by the emergency? It does seem that Haiti is fated to be a ward of the US and/or the international community, a basket-case in state form, for quite a long time to come. Anyway, it looks like La Libre does not do comments, so I don’t know how this guy’s “brothers of color” are supposed to check in with their anticipated objections. As for you, dear readers, you’re welcome to do so here by e-mail as always, and perhaps then I could pass along any suitable comments to La Libre.

What’s Chinese for “Starbucks”? Did you catch the news about how China is now the world’s biggest exporter in absolute terms, having recently eclipsed Germany? Or how the Middle Kingdom is very close – almost there, 9 out of 12 months last year – to passing the US as the world’s largest car market?

Now Isabelle de Foucaud of the French newspaper Le Figaro weighs in with another upcoming China milestone: The Chinese soon [to be] kings of consumption. “Soon,” but not really right away; her lede:

Chinese households are earning more and saving less. In consequence, Credit Suisse estimates that the Chinese could dethrone the United States at the first world-rank of consumption around 2020.

Yes, this pronouncement is based upon a survey that Credit Suisse recently did towards the end of last year among 2,700 respondents in eight major Chinese cities. In particular, this showed that Chinese personal saving rates have fallen from 26% in 2004 to 12% last year.

Where does all that newly-free income go? For now, the report says, it’s going to real estate and to cars, but it’s also starting to go into consumer goods, too. “The big international brands are rubbing their hands” in glee about this, writes De Foucaud, but they need to be careful: Chinese companies are getting ready to challenge foreign firms for these new consumers’ Yuan across-the-board, including in the high-tech and luxury sectors where up to now they have been absent.

From my reading of recent macroeconomic commentary, this increase in consumer spending is a quite healthy development towards “re-balancing” the recession-struck world economy, so it can’t come soon enough (indeed, in this perspective 2020 looks rather too far off). On the other hand, the strong economic growth that is behind these developments is also making China more into a nation of “haves” and “have-nots,” i.e. with top-earners enjoying much more income growth than the rest, and this itself is a dangerous development in traditionally-egalitarian Chinese society.

Maybe you’ve heard by this point that the Egyptian pyramids were not built by slaves after all. If you did, it was probably on Leno on Tuesday night: according to Jay, it seems even way back then the authorities found a way to finance the workers’ wages through some pyramid scheme.

Hyuk-hyuk. If you’re still interested, though, all of that other than the “pyramid scheme” part is true. Rasmus Dam Nielsen* of the Danish newspaper Politiken gives us the details.

The Egyptian government has always had a problem with the workers who built the pyramids being characterized as slaves, since in their view that opinion gives short shrift to the considerable construction talents that such personnel must have possessed. Just look at the results: it’s apparently difficult even to slip a knife into the cracks between the building-blocks. It was actually an Egyptian research time which recently made the key discovery of graves situated alongside the pyramids, 4,500 years old and containing the remains of workers who died while in the service of their construction. This has to mean they were not slaves: slaves would never have been allowed to be buried so close to the pharaohs’ tomb, which of course were the pyramids themselves.

The Egyptian researchers further calculate that around 10,000 workers were involved in constructing the pyramids in all (i.e. not all at the same time); they were involved in the work in shifts of three months at a time; and they consumed daily 21 cattle and 23 sheep, provided by outside ranchers who thereby discharged their tax burden to the prehistoric Egyptian state.

And how about this, also from Politiken: El Dorado did exist, namely somewhere in the Amazon jungle, and contemporary researchers believe they have found the site using Google Earth! But I’m moving on from this stuff . . . if you really want to know more, either learn yourself some Danish or e-mail me a request.

* He reminds me of one of my main complaints about the Danish press: there are too many Dam Nielsens!

I don’t mean at all to denigrate that devastating quake that hit Haiti on Tuesday. As you might imagine, I’ve found nothing interesting (i.e. “different”) about that in any foreign press to pass on here. Then again, it’s hard to think of any aspect of a quake that can be out-of-the-ordinary interesting: it’s usually just a monochrome tragedy, as hordes of people either die or lose the majority of whatever they own.

Unless, perhaps, a quake hits somewhere else while the world remains preoccupied with an earlier one. Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel reminds us that just yesterday a 6.2 Richter-scale earthquake hit just off the coast near the Indonesian town of Manokwari. We don’t know anything about damage or deaths yet, but that’s mainly because we’re talking about the western part of that huge island of New Guinea – it hit just above the big piece of land that looks like some animal’s head, you know the one I mean, the Vogelkop Peninsula.

We do know, however, that no tsunami-warning was given, even though the quake’s epicenter was in the ocean. Is that because there truly was no tsunami, or because the judgment was made that there are not enough genuine population centers in the area to make any such warning worthwhile?

What’s going on with the Swedish automobile manufacturer Saab (owned by General Motors since 1989)? Is it to die, or not? Not even the correspondent for the esteemed German business newspaper Handelsblatt, Harold Steuer, can quite figure out what is going on, but he does give that his best try (The tangled game around Saab continues).

If you haven’t been keeping track, Saab is supposedly in line to die because GM is ready to pull the plug and shut it down: the mother company announced last Friday that it was ready to begin Saab’s “orderly wind-down” and named some liquidaton-partners it expects to hire to help with that. But not so fast: cars are still being produced at the plant in Trollhättan! They are new models, even! What is more, a take-over offer from the Dutch sports car-maker Spyker (actually, that company’s third such offer) was put forward last Friday. There is a similar offer outstanding from a consortium of the investment company Genii Capital (based in Luxembourg) and Formula 1 head Bernie Ecclestone, and also one from yet another consortium that includes former Swedish politician Jan Nygren and the former head of the German truck-maker MAN, Håkan Samuelsson. And GM has made it clear that it is still open to considering all such offers.

The union representing Saab workers are furious at the resulting uncertainty about the company’s future, calling the company’s behavior “inconsistent and shocking.” And then there’s a further rumor Steuer reports of Saab moving a factory to China to produce there the new 9-5 model and/or Buicks directly on behalf of General Motors.

What to believe, if anything? Steuer makes the sensible observation that the best thing to believe is the fact-on-the-ground, namely that a new model (namely that “9-5” – maybe there even are plans to hire Dolly Parton as advertising spokeswoman?) is now starting production. So GM probably does not in fact plan to allow the company to shut down entirely just yet.

It’s all there in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Just months after rushing to order enough swine-flu vaccine to protect their citizens, European governments are canceling orders and trying to sell or give away extra doses as they sit on a glut of the vaccine.

The main reason: European health officials decided that only one shot per person was needed, instead of the two originally planned.

Actually, there may have been another reason, as announced in the headline of the Czech Republic’s largest-circulation mainstream paper Mladá fronta dnes: Expert: Swine flu pandemic is a swindle by the pharmaceutical companies.

That’s right, it is alleged their profits were not all that they should be, so the drug companies manufactured a crisis to pump up sales revenue by at least millions. But who is the “expert” making this claim? His name is Wolfgang Wodarg, and he is chairman of the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. (Note: that has no direct connection to the European Union, it’s a completely separate – in fact, earlier – organization. I know, it’s confusing . . .) And it seems that that Parliamentary Assembly will debate this question later this month, so maybe we’ll hear more about it then and become better able to judge.

Fortunately, the MFD article cited another piece giving all the details in the UK’s Daily Mail, so you can read about them there. But it also links to an article it published itself (i.e. in the Czech paper MFD) last July, about how the prominent Czech politician (and former Minister for Health) David Rath was also of the opinion that swine flu was just some sort of fraud for the benefit of the drug companies.

UPDATE: And indeed, French president Sarkozy’s house-newspaper Le Figaro is now announcing that the swine-flu epidemic there (known as “H1N1”) is over, according to an organization of French doctors called Réseau [i.e. network] Sentinelles France. At the same time, the article’s author (mysteriously known only as “C.J.”) says that it’s still recommended that one get immunized – the disease “could know a rebound.”

“Cold enough for you?” I know: a trite thing to say, and the worst part is that I used precisely those same first eleven words to begin another blog-post of just four days ago.

Still, I just couldn’t help myself, not when the answer is quite clearly “No!” for Chen Kechai, a Chinese man written about in a brief profile in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (“Snow-grave for a cool Chinese”). Go ahead and click through: there are three photos as well, featuring Mr. Chen rather extremely under-dressed both for the cold Chinese countryside around him (said to be -10ºC = 14ºF) and the activities in which he is engaging – burying himself in the snow, pouring cold water on his head, that kind of thing. It says here that he has been indulging in these antics since 1989.

Could this be the opening sparks of a new incarnation of German militarism? The local newspaper Der Tagesspiegel has the report: Kreuzberg vs. Neukölln – with snowballs. Yesterday, in the newest variation on the flash mob phenomenon, 200 to 300 people showed up at 2:00 PM in Berlin’s Görlitzer Park, summoned by the Internet, to fight. To fight for fun, that is, taking advantage of the many inches of snow available everywhere.

It was a contest between residents of those two Berlin neighborhoods, Kreuzberg and Neukölln, waged across the ditch in the park’s middle (with combat photographers in attendance, of course; the on-line article has an amusing YouTube video.) In the end Kreuzberg was declared the winner, controversially, but most by that time were too tired to care and settled down instead to drinking Glühwein (wine mixed with spices, a Christmas drink) and letting a DJ entertain them.

I’ve had occasion recently to mention Switzerland, unfortunately in connection with that country supposedly “letting [itself] be pushed around.” I say “unfortunately” because such an assertion does not mix well with this other interesting article I’ve come across, by Adam Černý, in the main Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny: A troika of three women govern conservative Switzerland this year. No, I tell you that I do not want to make any connection of the one with the other!

In any event, it’s true: Doris Leuthard is now the Swiss president, while Erika Forster-Vanini is head of the upper chamber of the Swiss parliament and Pascale Bruderer is head of the lower. Even though Ms. Leuthard’s achievement should be seen in light of the Swiss practice of switching the presidency every year to a pre-determined member of the Federal Council, thus not by any election, it is nonetheless notable if only because the two previous women who have been Swiss president have been from the Left, of the Socialist Party. Ms. Leuthard is a Christian Democrat, the sort of right-wing German political formation more likely to feel that the age-old slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche (“children, kitchen, church”) best encapsulates all that women should really worry their pretty little heads about.

The fact of three women now occupying the top Swiss governing functions is further striking because, as the HN headline notes, it’s a particularly conservative country. You might have heard how its citizens voted in November to forbid the building of minarets, and women there got the vote in the first place, on a country-wide basis, only in 1971. What is more, a full 30% of members of the Parliament are female. As Černý notes, that is a higher proportion than in the legislatures of the UK, France, Italy, and Austria. It may not be higher than the female-legislator rates in the Scandinavian countries, but there they employ quotas to boost their numbers from the distaff side, whereas the Swiss do not.

Sorry to disturb your Sunday peace: there’s an article now in Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza titled Damage to atomic electricity plant in Russia. Here’s the lede:

One of the blocks of the Volga-Don Atomic Electric Plant in the vicinity of Rostov-on-Don was closed down after there occurred this morning a ruptured pipe in the steam generator.

The plant’s director, Aleksandr Palamarchuk, has assured the press that there has been no damage involving radioactivity, and that radiation readings are “within the norm.” It is planned to get the malfunctioning block started again in about four days’ time.

Interestingly, this plant does not seem to be of the type of old Soviet-style reactors that we’ve heard of before (e.g. Chernobyl), as it was put into operation only nine years ago, and already provides about one-seventh of the electric power consumed in southern European Russia. Nonetheless, it had a problem before, just last month in the very same sub-block, which meant that that part of the plant has been producing minimal levels of power since that time. Now it’s producing nothing, due to that “ruptured pipe” (pęnknięcie rury).

“Cold enough for you?” I know: a trite thing to say. Everyone knows already that it’s cold: Europe, North America, Asia. Better if someone could tell us why, and what we can do about it!

Comes now Pierre Le Hir, writing in Le Monde, with a bit of explanation (Why the Northern Hemisphere suffers under cold waves). According to his account, this winter’s extraordinary cold is the product of one key variable, together with another aggravating factor. That variable is NAO, or North Atlantic oscillation, which is the weather-pattern determined by the intensities of the low-pressure center usually somewhere around Iceland and the high-pressure center usually around the Azores. If NAO is positive, then winds coming into Europe carrying warmth stored by the Atlantic are strong, resulting in a mild winter; if it’s negative, they are weak, resulting in cold.

Naturally, right now NAO is negative. Then there is that aggravating factor, of which you have heard before: El Niño, defined as abnormally-high surface-water temperatures in the Pacific. Starting from last summer the El Niño phenomenon has been elsewhere than where it usually is found (more mid-Pacific than near to the South American coast). This helps to make things yet colder in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in North America. In fact, author Le Hir reports that the weather establishment still does not regard the cold experienced so far this winter in Europe to be particularly outside of the realm of expectation – for all of the deaths (22 in the UK) and various disruptions to transport in France and some other countries that the article goes on to list.

Oh, and as to that second point: We can’t do anything about it.

That’s as in Asian Indians, although who knows? Maybe American Indians should also forget about heading “down under” for a while. This “no-travel” advice is addressed by the Indian government to its citizens, according to coverage in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten. (I know: talk about globalization!) It is prompted by a wave of ugly attacks against Indians in Melbourne, topped off by a recent incident in which a gang actually set one young Indian man on fire. His condition is still listed as “critical” at a local hospital. Indeed, although such attacks (although usually not involving fire) have occurred over the past couple years, the local Indian community in Australia is worried that they are becoming ever-more frequent.

Attention scriptwriters! It’s been almost seven months already: why have we yet to see any forthcoming screenplay about the four Uighurs (i.e. western Chinese Muslims) who were released from solitary at Guantánamo after seven years there (they were absolutely innocent of anything even resembling terrorist activities – goes without saying) straight to lovely Bermuda? Just consider this text from Erik Eckholm’s New York Times article:

In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos [har har!], the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbors, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement.

“I went swimming in the ocean for the first time ever yesterday, and it was the happiest day of my life,” said Salahidin Abdulahat, 32.

C’mon, I mean it practically writes itself! Call the film “The Four Uighurs”; Johnny Depp, in scruffy beard, stars as Abdulahat, who winds up working every day in a wetsuit training dolphins to undertake military missions for the Royal Navy from the nearby naval base. His three buddies eventually pool their earnings from work in private gardens and at popsicle-stands to open up their own seaside camping-ground, which they name Camp Delta. Trouble arrives in the form of a restaurant (originally called “Git Ma,” Chinese for “enemy combatant”) started up in the neighborhood by a pair of Cantonese immigrant families. In the end, though, through various hijinks and comic situations everyone learns to live together again in sun-struck island harmony – in fact, Depp even mentors one dolphin with a surprising aptitude for performing point-to-point coastal Chinese take-out deliveries. Take it from there . . .

Maybe you can’t handle writing about an island situation for some reason? Fine, then consider instead the story of another set of Uighurs from Guantánamo, reported on today in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, whom the Obama administration wants to release into yet another sort of strange, paradise-like environment, namely the alpine hills and valleys of Switzerland. This real-life story, alas, comes with no guaranteed happy ending. As Trouw reports, the Swiss are willing enough to accept the former inmates (two of them this time; completely innocent, of course) to try to get back in the good graces of the Obama administration after some prior trouble involving American demands that the Swiss give up their bank-account secrecy. But the Chinese authorities are objecting here, and have warned the Swiss government against taking them. They say that the Uighurs are legitimate terror-suspects after all, and the only place they should go henceforth is back to China for trial.

This scenario could well end up a tragedy, for you can well imagine the “trial” and generally-unpleasant reception the Chinese have prepared for these men. Unfortunately, the recent record of the Swiss of letting themselves be pushed around is not good: there is still an embarrassing dispute ongoing with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, involving a public apology to Libya by the Swiss president and two Swiss businessmen still held in Tripoli and about to face trial there on trumped-up charges.

Football fans out there among you (that is: “soccer”) might be aware that this upcoming Sunday marks the start of the African Cup of Nations tournament, between that continent’s best national teams. An event that happens in January/February every even-numbered year, the African Cup is said to be sure to draw more world-wide interest this time than ever before because, after all, the first-ever World Cup tournament to be held in Africa will follow soon afterwards, in June. That certainly seems to be so, as we have no less than Christian Henkel of the Financial Times Deutschland writing a piece about it, specifically about host-country Angola (Africa Cup: Hoping for Angola’s Art of Improvisation).

Then again, perhaps Henkel’s interest here is more of the rubbernecking variety, the irresistible attraction to passers-by of a ten-car highway pile-up, since Angola’s hosting does seem to be a disaster in the making. In the middle of his piece he mentions the “open secret” that none of the other participating African nations really wanted Angola to be the host. Why? Mainly because – according to Henkel – Luanda, the capital city, has ranked as the world’s most-expensive capital since 2008. Twelve euros for a double cheeseburgers; more importantly, three hundred-euro per night as the cheapest room-rate at any passable hotel. The latter naturally impacts directly on the other national teams that will be spending time in the country to compete, but it also means that precious few of their fans will be able to travel along with them. Those fans will also suffer from the country’s “catastrophic” transportation infrastructure as they try to get around to the various games, with no formal system of taxicabs and no real public transportation. That’s where the “improvisation” in the title comes from: that hope is all that both organizers and participating teams have left to clutch at towards a four-week tournament that won’t end up making everyone (other than the hosts) penniless and insane. (Ticket prices for the games, however, are said to be quite reasonable.)

Perhaps you’re asking “How could a country that just emerged from a long civil war [it ended in 2002] be so expensive?” The answer is oil, as well as diamonds, which together have made the economy quite fast-growing, but really only for a few. Henkel cites one figure that, while some can afford the €12 double cheeseburgers, 70% of Angola’s population still subsists on less than €1.50 per day. The Africa Cup tournament is in the minds of some – somehow – supposed to help heal this divide; in the words of the Angolan Minister for Youth and Sport, Gonçalvez Muandumba*, “The Africa Cup should kindle enthusiasm for sport in our population and thereby further social integration.”

* With apologies to Dave Barry, I hasten to assure you that I did not just make that name up!

Get ready for more trouble on the European Muslim-relations front: Le Monde reports today that one French legislator, Jean-François Copé, has expressed his intention to introduce legislation forbidding the wearing of a veil in “places open to the public,” to be punished by a hefty €750 fine, also applicable to people “who oblige a women to wear a full veil”. He proposes this in an interview to appear in the issue of the right-wing magazine Le Figaro to be published over the coming weekend; Le Monde has simply managed to blow the whistle early on what is presumably the most news-worthy component of that piece.

This matters because Copé is head of the group of parliamentarians in the French National Assembly that belong to the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) which is also President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party – and because it would seem that the European political scene could use a break from this sort of measure in the wake of the referendum in Switzerland last November that forbade the building of minarets there. Strangely, in his interview Copé also mentions that his proposed law would incorporate “a period for dialogue of six months between the date of application of the law and the date of promulgation to permit a phase for discussion and mediation with the concerned persons.” That seems a strange way to proceed – legislate first, discuss later – and is unlikely to salve the feelings of the Muslim inhabitants of the country against whom this law clearly is aimed.

Horrors! Further snowfall hit yesterday across Northern Europe, and now the Danish newspaper Politiken features the screaming headline Danes caught in airport-chaos. (Note that it’s really not accurate to describe Politiken as a sensationalist tabloid; if that’s what you’re looking for, try Ekstrabladet, among others, and you’ll be able to see the difference on the very homepage.)

The snow came down particularly heavy in England, canceling several Premier League football games (if you want an indication about just how serious it really turned out to be), so the paper’s Astrid Søndberg mainly concentrates on the travails at London’s Heathrow airport. “I spent the night in terminal 5 together with 2,000 others,” reveals on-the-spot witness Line Bjørn. Everyone needs to rebook their flights due to the weather, she says, but “that’s going to slowly since there are not enough personnel. They can’t come out to the airport because of the weather.” Naturally, both the telephone service and website of her carrier – British Airways, note bene – are also down. Similar scenes occurred in Dublin and Amsterdam, according to an SAS Airlines spokesman.

The renowned Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon was so kind as to answer the question I put to him about whether this weblog would be more valuable as just a “link blog.” In case you’re a bit late to this, trying to take a look at his answer which has scrolled way down, you can search on the phrase “I read 10+ European languages,” but let me save you the trouble, here’s what he opined:

Linking to foreign-language articles is tough — but the eurointelligence.com daily news briefing is good, and something along those lines but done on an intraday basis would be fantastic. Give it a go, see if it’s fun and if it works!

I’m indeed inclined to give that a try, as you will soon start to see on this website, perhaps accompanied on occasion with the longer-type articles I have tended to write this far. As always, reader feedback by e-mail is welcome. (Yes, I suppose I also need to start think about offering an alternate EuroSavant version for reading on the smaller screens of mobile devices!)

Are you as afflicted by the ice-cold January weather as we are here in the Netherlands? Those of you dear readers living in the Southern Hemisphere – my statistics tell me that there are a few – I exclude from the get-go, but otherwise a story-book January does seem to be in effect in Europe, North America, and throughout Asia.

Love that or hate it (I’m not so enthusastic, to tell you the truth), there will always be winners emerging from this situation. Among these are clearly Holland’s ice-skate sellers, as we see from an article in Het Parool (Gekkenhuis [“Crazy-House”] at ice-skate factories).

The unnamed reporter from the Dutch news agency ANP sought out for his/her story the firms “Viking” in Almere and “Zandstra” in Joure (a city in Friesland, the Dutch province especially known for its ice-skating ardor). They’re likely not the only ones in the Netherlands, but provided some good material nonetheless. Normally, says Viking director Jaap Havekotte, they sell around 20,000 pairs of skates per year; this year they are on track for 50,000 or 60,000 pairs. “Our skates are flying out the door,” says the Dutchman. (Yes, that’s really the quote: Onze schaatsen vliegen de deur uit.) Zandstra spokesman Marco Vlap doesn’t want to reveal exact numbers, but confirms that his firm is also working like mad but probably won’t be able to keep up with this year’s demand.

Actually, points out Havekotte, last winter in December (2008) we also had a bit of a cold spell that set people to skating and so brought with it elevated sales figures. He doesn’t have to explicitly say it, but in most Dutch minds it had yet another effect: raising hopes for the holding of the Elfstedentocht, an eleven-city race over the frozen streams and canals of Friesland that occupies an honored and central place in Frisian and Dutch culture and is held whenever ice conditions permit – which they last did only back in January of 1997! Think of the Super Bowl – to come up with an American cultural equivalent – but one strictly subject to the weather year after year for its happening at all! (You can check it out at the Elfstedentocht website, including the race-route, but the text is available only in Dutch or Frisian!) The cold didn’t last long enough then for that, but maybe it will this time, in which case you can expect some tenths-of-a-percentage point to be shaved from the 2010 GDP in the blizzard of sick-days taken as people flock up to Friesland and/or in front of their TV sets.

While you’re waiting to see if that happens, this article in English (“Amsterdam prepares canals for ice skating fun”) tells of our fine city’s preparations for letting people skate on certain of the historic canals, should the cold weather indeed continue. Personally, I sincerely hope that it won’t, but nonetheless those measures now being undertaken are mainly banning boat traffic on certain of the canals to protect the forming ice. You can peruse a map here showing to which stretches of which canal that ban applies, as well as the accompanying detailed list.

What’s heading the list of most-read articles in the mainstream Slovak newspaper Sme would not normally merit the notice of the rest of the world. Today, though, it points to a most-amusing story: Airport police hid explosives in baggage. One [set of explosives] flew off to Dublin.

So, the Slovak and the Irish Republics: not two countries one would normally associate with one another. Now the latter is rather cross at the former, and since one side to the dispute does use English as an official language, you can read about all the details in the Irish Independent, among other places.

Executive Summary: Slovak police decided they needed to conduct an exercise to test airport screening personnel, so they inserted actual explosives into the luggage of eight unwitting passengers. Unfortunately, one of them managed to make it through security without being detected, and so actually flew to Dublin while carrying one-tenth of a kilogram of explosives in his suitcase. The hapless explosives-mule, 49-year-old electrician Stefan Gonda, according to the Independent article actually lives smack-dab in central Dublin – which was where a multi-block area was sealed off earlier today and five buildings evacuated, as an explosives team from the Irish Army arrived to greet Mr. Gonda and secure the stash.

Apologies are now flowing profusely to the Irish from Slovak government officials. Following on the heels of the “underwear bomber” above Detroit on Christmas Day, this is really rather abysmal timing for such a similar incident. Too few people in the world – excluding also certain US Senators, as in one “McCain, John” – are even aware of Slovakia’s existence, preferring to utter “Czechoslovakia,” but this is not really the ideal way for that country to make itself better known. And in keeping with that general obscurity, this further article from Sme (“Police: We informed the Irish today”) makes it clear that the incident happened at the “international airport” in Poprad*, and not at the Bratislava airport as the Independent article would have it. On that same page you can relish no fewer than two videos featuring embarrassed Slovak officials mouthing their excuses to the press – respectively the Poprad police chief and the spokeswoman for Poprad-Tatry Airport – but of course those excuses are mouthed in Slovak.

* OK, maybe you don’t know that Poprad is over in the eastern part of the country, while Bratislava is way over in the western part, but you surely heard of the city before, back when it was a candidate to host the 2006 Winter Olympics! Seriously, though, those looking for a cheap-but-good skiing vacation – particularly European residents – should check the place out.