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.
Soccer cliches in general, actually, but edifying on this off day.
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They clearly deserved a lot better than going down 3-0 today.
Too bad Essien was not on the field : the lack of skilled shooters on Ghana’s part (and an horrendous call by an otherwise pretty good referee) doomed what could have been a tremendous upset.
Here’s hoping Spain or France send this cocky, overrated Brazilian team back home next Saturday.
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.
News from Berlin these days tends to come from the enormous parties in front of the Brandenburger Tor or in the Tiergarten. But spare a thought for a moment from whether Ghana will beat the eminently beatable Brazilian team and glance over to the Reichstag building, home of Germany’s parliament.
Today, more or less as I write, Joschka Fischer is taking part in his final session as a German parliamentarian. He leaves behind a long list of firsts, significant achievements and all of the right enemies. Member of the first Green delegation in the Bundestag, first parliamentary leader of that delegation, first Green minister in a state government, member of the first Red-Green cabinet at the national level — and thus first Green vice-chancellor and first Green foreign minister.
He’ll be teaching for a year at Princeton, but nobody in the German press believes we have heard the last of Joschka Fischer. I don’t believe it either. He’s too big a talent to fade away.
Can the Italians win a game without a significant boost from the referees?
So, Franz Beckenbauer, the president of the organizing comittee of the World Cup, got married yesterday with his long-time partner Heidi Burmester.
Nothing especially interesting here, except for the shocking fact that the Kaiser did not even bother to let his coworkers know beforehand about his wedding. World Cup spokesman Jens Grittner has this amazing reaction to the news:
Heute beginnt für ihn ein ganz normaler Arbeitstag. Er wird sich die beiden Achtelfinalspiele Deutschland gegen Schweden in München und Argentinien gegen Mexiko in Leipzig anschauen.
Loosely and badly translated as : “Today is really a normal working day for him. He will attend the two round-of-16 games between Germany and Sweden in Munich and between Argentina and Mexico in Leipzig.”
I was tempted to say “lucky bastard” but then I realized that Beckenbauer also had to endure the ghastly England-Ecuador game this afternoon.
“Berlin! Berlin! We’re going to Berlin!”
That was the big chant among the crowds at the three or four different venues where I watched parts of Germany’s victory over Sweden today. And, you know, they might well be.
Downtown Munich is one big party zone right now. I’ll be back, er, later.
(Sorry, David.)
I’ve been surprised at the lack of uproar over the discovery that the CIA has been data mining SWIFT transfer archives. I suppose it’s because this is far from the first troubling secret breech of the right to privacy by the Bush administration, and most people – the ones that don’t have large sums of money – generally don’t have any banking privacy anyway. But this new secret program touches a core Bush constituency: white-collar criminals. If Bush is able to secretly monitor transactions in the name of anti-terrorism, a future Democratic government might be able to use it against money laundering and accounting fraud. That’s surely something the Republican Party could never stand for.
SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium, but operates computer centres both in the US and the EU, so the company probably was not in a position to refuse the government’s request. According to page 4 of the original NY Times article: “Intelligence officials were so eager to use the Swift data that they discussed having the C.I.A. covertly gain access to the system, several officials involved in the talks said.” If they were prepared to break in to get the data, there was little to be gained by the firm taking a stand.
But I note in today’s Le Monde something about this affair that I find troubling.
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As David said, “Cool when underdogs win. Just not against us.”
(I know this happened 24 hours ago. It just took time to face up to putting it into a blog post.)