Monthly Archives: December 2004

Yushchenko: confirmation near?

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Following the reports earlier this week about the non-confirmation of the cause of Viktor Yuschenko’s illness, he has now returned to the hospital in Austria this weekend for a series of further tests that will try and assess the cause of it.

At the clinic in Vienna, doctors will carry out tissue biopsies, including tests on Mr Yushchenko’s skin.

“It will be an entire imaging diagnosis to look at the size and function of his various organs. We are going to reassess the entire blood chemistry, including possible types of poisoning,” said Dr Michael Zimpfer, director of the Rudolfinerhaus hospital.

Wideface.

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… or maybe ‘black paint’? Acouple of days ago, my sister told me she had a topic I could write about on afoe. It had occured to her that all continental names, except Europe, start with an ‘a’, and she wondered why that might be the case. A quick check at wikipedia revealed that her statement is only correct when using a (although perhaps still the most common?) five-continents classification system and when referring to ‘Oceania’ as ‘Australia’. Moreover, there are a number of naming schemes for continents, which, while always featuring a majority of continent-names starting with an ‘A’, also consist of continents beginning with other letters – eg North, and South A-merica.

Despite the wikipedia-induced realization that any continental naming-scheme conspiracy theory was stillborn, I became interested in the etymology of continents, Europe in particular, only remembering that ‘Europa’ was a Phoenician princess Zeus kidnapped by transforming himself into a bull. But it took only a modest amount of further googling to find out that the left-leaning German newspaper taz had also, quite recently, been interested in the subject.
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Happy End?

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We mentioned on Tuesday that some analysts of Russian foreign policy had suggested President Putin’s harsh words about “veiled Western colonialism” were an imlicit concession that he would not get the “Ukraine-deal” with the West terms he had hoped for. Simlpy because there was nothing “the West” or any consituent parts thereof had to trade in this respect, even had they wanted to. It seems, those analysts were right: Reuters reports –

“Former Cold War foes NATO and Russia on Thursday played down weeks of tension over rigged presidential poll results in Ukraine and issued a joint call for free and fair elections at the end of the month.

…

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeated accusations of western meddling to deprive Yanukovich the office. But both Lavrov and NATO insisted there had been no confrontation and pointed to new cooperation pacts as a sign of good ties.”

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Orange in Berlin (II)

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The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Center for Applied Policy Research (CAP) and the German-Ukrainian Forum hosted a day-long seminar on the Ukrainian election on December 6 at the Ebert Fondation?s home in Berlin.

Speakers included the leader of the OSCE election observation mission, the director of the school of political analysis at the National University in Kiev, members of the European and German Parliaments, and an expert from Ukraine?s Center for Peace, Conversion and Foreign Policy.

The background papers for the conference are now online at the CAP’s web site here. There is also a brief conference report (in German) on the same web site here. If a longer report becomes available, we will let you know.,