Monthly Archives: November 2005

Your mother, your rat, your infidel house, your God, etc.

Posted on by

Andrew Brown points us to an illuminating article by Bernard Nežmah on swearing in Serbian. Though the article is five years old, I daresay its theme is timeless.

According to Nežmah’s piece — published in Central Europe Review or, as we must now call it, Transitions Online — the Serbian language is blessed with a dazzling, perhaps unsurpassed richness of vulgarisms. Even English, no slouch at that sort of thing, pales in comparison: such are the subtleties of the Serbian variants on the F-word that Serbian-English dictionaries (the more comprehensive editions, one imagines) are reduced to explaining in an aside whether a given word for ‘fuck’ is jocularly offensive, just plain offensive, really really offensive, so offensive it should be used only in the event of war, etc.

A tip of the jaunty afoe fedora to Andrew (who surprises us by revealing he used to speak Serbo-Croat in addition to English, Swedish, Caenorhabditic and whatever else he has up his sleeve).

A Little Archipelago

Posted on by

If you had long suspected that under the Bush administration the CIA was running secret prisons around the world, now you know. It wasn’t just the one in Thailand, which was closed in 2003, and the annex at the tip of Cuba, closed last year.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

Which Eastern European countries, you may ask?

UPDATE: FT Deutschland does indeed say more, as does the FT in English.
Continue reading →

Easterners conquer Germany; southerners flee

Posted on by

Brandenburg’s Matthias Platzeck has been tapped to become new leader of the SPD. This means that Germany’s two major parties will both be led by people from the ‘new states’, the former GRD. Franz Müntefering will, however, enter the new cabinet as planned.

The CSU’s Ede Stoiber won’t be going to Prussia, though. He has decided to remain in Munich as Bavarian prime minister. Michael Glos will get Stoiber’s designated CSU place at the table instead.

Stoiber’s decision can only mean he thinks that the grand coalition will fail and that it would therefore be better to stay unconnected with it. Whether he is right about this is, of course, another matter.

(No links, sorry. This is all from the ARD teletext. I’ll try to stick in links to fuller treatments later in the day.)

Angie 2.0 – March 26, 2006?

Posted on by

Update (2/11/05, 01:30 CET) – Maybe Angie 2.0 is actually a guy: two East German are now heading Germany’s biggest parties. The SPD crisis management team agreed late Tuesday evening to offer Brandenburg’s state premier Matthias Platzeck (German biography) the party’s chairmanship. Absent any surprises, this nomination will probably be confirmed by the upcoming party conference.

Update (1/11/05, 16:19) below the fold.

Does everybody really get a second chance? Or will it just be Angela Merkel? Not too surprisingly, Edmund Stoiber was the first to realise that the SPD’s power reshuffle after Franz Müntefering’s sort-of instant resignation, even in case a successor will be named quickly (currently, the only two candidates allegedly under consideration are the state premiers Kurt Beck and Mathias Platzeck), is leading to a situation in which the arithmetics of a grand coalition don’t really add up anymore, not simply because coalition talks with a SPD delegation headed by a combination of acting and designated leaders will suffer from a relative affluence in cooks dealing with the broth.
Continue reading →