Observed, with thoughts on imams’ roles in European societies, at The Reality-Based Community.
The view is to die for: over the valley to the Alhambra with the Sierra Nevada behind. The idea of the mosque, more a spiritual caravanserai and place for refreshment than an arena for strenuous communal effort like a synagogue or a church, is one of Islam’s better inventions.
Interesting. Original, in Estonian.
For months now, a dispute about the demolition of a bronze statue from the Soviet era has been raging in Tallinn. Krista Kodres takes up the cudgel for the communist regime’s cultural legacy. “Just imagine if people had pulled down the palaces of the hated Bourbons after the French Revolution, or if the Winter Palace and the Kremlin had been destroyed in the Russian Revolution. Or what if Estonia had destroyed its huge estates, the symbol of 700 years of slavery… The Soviet Union had its own culture too. Naturally, it wasn’t always free of ideological influence, but writers wrote, artists painted, composers composed and architects built. True, not all of it can be called high culture, but everything that was created can still be categorised as culture.”
From the estimable folks at Eurotopics.
By Craig Whitlock, of the Washington Post
Boxed away in a former Nazi SS barracks in this central German town is the core of one of the largest collections of historical documents from World War II. All told, the archive contains 50 million records that list the names of 17.5 million people, including concentration camp prisoners, forced laborers and other victims of the Third Reich.
For 60 years, the International Committee of the Red Cross has used the documents to trace the missing and the dead, especially those of the Holocaust. But the archive has remained off-limits to historians and the public, fueling an increasingly bitter dispute among Holocaust researchers, Jewish groups and the 11 nations that oversee the collection.
From the BBC News site comes this disconcerting news:
Europe is falling behind Asia in terms of education and skills, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
It blames France and Germany which are criticised for mediocre education systems and their inherent class bias.
And further on:
“Europeans from difficult socio-economic backgrounds don’t receive the same educational opportunities as children from rich and middle-class families,” the study said.
It seems we are wasting a lot of potential here, not to mention the loss in future competitiveness and possible social unrest.
Brighton College, a modest private school in the South of England, has announced that Mandarin Chinese is to become part of school’s core curriculum from September. Now all it needs is for the state sector to follow suit:
In a clear sign of China’s growing economic and political clout, a British school has become the first in the country to make Mandarin Chinese a compulsory subject for all pupils…..
“One of my key tasks is to make sure that the pupils at Brighton College are equipped for the realities of the 21st century, and one of those realities is that China has the fastest growing economy in the world,” Richard Cairns, headmaster of Brighton College, said.
“This year China replaced Britain as the world’s fourth largest economy. We in Britain need to face up to this challenge, see it for the trading opportunity that it is, and ensure that our nation’s children are well-placed to thrive in this new global reality.
“A better understanding of the language and culture of China will be hugely to the advantage of the children of Brighton College.”
Well the WHO certainly isn’t thinking of taking half measures. The debate is now surely divided between those who say ‘don’t panic’, and those who want to be able to argue ‘don’t say you weren’t warned’.
The World Health Organisation on Thursday predicted governments would need to quarantine about 120,000 people to contain an initial pandemic flu outbreak of just 19 cases……Not only would such aggressive quarantining raise legal and human rights concerns, he said, but knowledge about how to use antiviral drugs as a preventative measure was limited.
Meantime the virus seems to have undergone a small mutation, while the firus itself seems in danger of becoming endemic in Turkey and spreading.
Benjamin Harvey seems to be blogging the situation from inside Turkey, but I can’t find his blog. Anyone got the link?
Well, it’s nice to know someone is thinking about us.
China’s Huawei Technologies, one of the world’s leading networking and telecommunications equipment suppliers (and big Cisco rival), has just announced that it has signed a contract with British Telecom for the deployment of its multi-service access network (MSAN) and Transmission equipment for the BT 21CN network. This seems to be an important step forward for Huawei.
The contract is signed today after going through a two year rigorous procurement and authentication process. This is one of the single largest procurement programs undertaken in the communications industry, to underpin BT’s GBP10 billion 21st Century Network programme over the next five years. This rigorous authentication process was used to assess Huawei’s capabilities, which included the quality of Huawei’s products and solutions, direction of Huawei’s corporate development strategy, management system, quality control system, project management capability and corporate social responsibility.
Huawei believes that the 21CN project and BT’s investment in Huawei’s innovation will spearhead the development of more new products and services for the British telecommunications industry and is of strategic importance to both UK businesses and economy. This will not only generate more new job opportunities within Huawei UK but also for our local service partners.
I still feel very ambivalent about Nicholas Sarkozy. Clearly France needs reform, and he seems to be the most likely politician to bring it, but some of his words and deeds worry me. His attitude towards positive discrimination as a step towards equality of opportunity for the ‘new French’ is obviously a point in his favour (at least for me it is), on the other hand his ‘tightening’ of the immigration laws is a step in entirely the opposite direction. France needs to resolve its ability handle cultural diversity, not turn its back on it. Today we have another example of what makes me nervous:
“France’s colonial past caught up with Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday as the interior minister cancelled a Caribbean trip to avoid protests over what some claim are political attempts to glorify the country’s history as a colonial power.”
“The last-minute cancellation of Mr Sarkozy’s trip to the French overseas territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe is the latest sign the government has raised racial tensions by introducing a law calling for schools to teach the “positive role†of colonisation.”
In a globalised world, internal politics and external politics are hard to separate, especially when there are parts of France which lie outside the geographical frontiers of Europe. My point would not really be whether everything was bad about colonialism or not, but about what someone who claims to be in favour of ‘deregulation’ is doing introducing a law which states:
“the school syllabus should recognise, in particular, the benefits of the French presence in overseas territoriesâ€.
We have what appears to be the biggest outbreak yet of the avian flu in Europe in Ukraine. More than 2,000 domestic birds have died of it in a remote region of the Crimean peninsula:
President Viktor Yushchenko declared a state of emergency in five villages on Saturday after the agriculture ministry said it had identified the H5 subtype of bird flu virus. Officials enforced a quarantine and began culling and burning the villages’ birds on Sunday.
But the government’s failure to notice the outbreak earlier is likely to heighten concerns across Europe about Ukraine’s ability to deal with the bird flu problem. Ukrainian villagers who keep birds in their gardens are at particular risk, because they regularly handle birds that may have come into contact with the migratory wild birds that spread the virus.