Quote:

Araud took the opportunity of the visit of the U.S. members of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to offer, in his typically plain-spoken fashion, a thumb-nail history of U.S.-French relations since World War II, including our different approaches to NATO. Recalling an Cold War bromide, Araud said …

Fact: Yesterday, a 23 yo Nigerian man attempted to ignite a flammable substance aboard flight DL253, a short time before landing in Detroit. Other passengers saw a bright light and a sound of fireworks before the man was stopped and the device extinguished.

The plane departed from Amsterdam. The first …

Liu Xiaobo is on trial. The verdict is due on Dec 25th, 2009, when western media is on holiday so as to reduce international attention on the case.

Liu Xiaobo is a human rights activist and signatory of Charter 08, a groundbreaking manifesto requesting the modernization of the Chinese state …

In other news:

• The world’s richest nation only barely failed to elect a talking corpse now irrelevant in politics and the dumbest potential state leader in the history of modern democracy.
• In other views “The U.S. is the only country in the world where the major candidates for …

Today’s conversation added to the list of concerns evolving around my mind at the moment:

• will China invade Siberia when oil becomes scarce? or Iran?
• what will be the form of the next conflict between Japan and China?
• who will end up controlling North Korea?
• why doesn’t the …

Leaving for a land so close and yet so remote is an exciting prospect.

The idea came a few days ago from a pair of friends, who intend to visit several cities as part of a small scale version of Flickr’s Jumping Project; besides the pictures, they intend to …

Today the read box from irrepressible.info was quoting a paragraph from the Iranian Gay & Lesbian Healthcare Providers Association; this prompted me to discover more about this group, and I read some of their articles.

In one of them the following sentence rung a bell:

My family, like most Iranian …

Quote:

Our leaders, both in the EU and the US, paid careful attention to the lessons learned in the French Revolution, namely that as long as you keep your people well fed and entertained, you can do whatever you damn well please. In the French Revolution, the people storming the …

Today, I learn that the USA opposes G8 climate proposal. I’m not surprised, although I’m interested to learn that they are now “isolated on the issue among G8 members.”

They are one of several global enemies when it comes to environment issues.

In other news, Irak gets bombed …

In a recent study made by the NBER (National Bureau of Echonomic Research) and commented recently on Slate, it is shown that

there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day — the sum of work for pay and work …

Usually the end of FOSDEM is the occasion for newcomers to observe RMS in person and maybe get a true sample of a beautiful troll about Vi and GNU Emacs.

Hopefully, it did not happen this time. Instead, we got a talk from Georg Greve, president of the Free Software …

During the proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials, the psychologist Gustave Gilbert visited Hermann Göring in his cell. He later reports the conversation in his book Nuremberg Diary published in 1947:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not …

`Wacquant <http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xe7ui_wacquant>`__ envoyé par `jeanbeatles <http://www.dailymotion.com/jeanbeatles>`__

This video was set as a decoration on the sidebar of a weblog I read every now and then: essaisconcepts. For the non-French-literate, the speaker on the video explains that some random idea …