Ukraine

Weekend blog catchup

Sunday, 17 April 2005, 23:25

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine says “there’s something very wrong with your life when you start looking on Saturday as blog catch-up day.”

Sunday isn’t much better, I guess. But following a manic couple of days, here are some quick links to things I have somehow managed to find the time to find interesting over the last two days:

• Presenting a list of WMDs that terrorists might want to obtain, the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s international intelligency agency, says he doesn’t think al-Qaeda has managed to obtain nuclear weapons, but that he his concerned about radiological weapons.
• The Periscope notes a provocative New Statesman article that says organisations in both Saudi Arabia and the United States are exporting fundamentalism.
• Tony Blair should be more careful about where he sticks his fingers — especially when photographers are present.
• Matthew Yglesias has discovered that he would be a Labour supporter in the British election, largely because of Iraq. British readers will find the comments section on this post interesting as an example of how the American centre-left is discussing the British election.
• Speaking of American perceptions of the election, be sure to check out the Christian Science Monitor’s take on MG Rover and the election.
• Looking at the looming referendum in France, the Monitor also has a pro-adoption editorial on the European Constitution:
  

  … one overarching appeal should be made: The EU and its precursors have successfully overcome the aggressive nationalism that caused so much suffering in the past century. Overall, the EU has proven such a success that other countries are clamoring to join. The constitution — no, let’s say the “simplifying treaty” — is the next logical step in this historic experiment.

• Timothy Garton Ash and Timothy Snyder have a lengthy piece about Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in the New York Review of Books.
• Dan Gillmor has an important post linking to various thoughts on the changing economics of journalism.
• Via Gillmor, I also came across a topical article by Chris Daly, a journalism professor at Boston University, entitled “Are Bloggers Journalists? Let’s ask Thomas Jefferson”.
• Major sporting events are bad for the environment, reports the New Scientist. Researchers have found that the 2004 FA Cup final at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium had an ecological footprint of 3,051 hectares.
• And oh yes: John Foster is the first baseball player to have played in both Britain’s top domestic baseball competition and Major Leagues. While he was a college player in 1997, he spent a summer with my club, the Brighton Buccaneers, before going back to the States and becoming a professional. Following a serious injury last year, he’s just been promoted back to the Major Leagues by the Atlanta Braves.

Comments

Laughland responds

Wednesday, 1 December 2004, 00:19

A letter in tomorrow today’s Guardian:

I am surprised that a simple internet trawl qualifies as investigative journalism for David Aaronovitch (PR man to Europe’s nastiest regimes, G2, November 30), especially since the “trails” he follows about me are ones which I announce at the bottom of my own articles.

But I wonder if Aaronovitch’s Googling led him to use as a source an article entitled “Can a lobbyist for dictators work as a journalist?”, a recently posted attack on me which is almost identical to his own. The home page, Ukrainian Archive, which has links to all the western-backed “pro-democracy” groups in Ukraine itself, also carries virulently antisemitic articles about the Jewish proclivity for rape, and about how the gas chambers at Auschwitz could not have existed. If I am being simultaneously attacked by a former communist who now supports George Bush’s wars, and by raving Jew-baiting Ukrainian nationalists, I must be doing something right.

John Laughland
London

Hmmm… Straw men, mainly. Wikipedia has more on BHHRG

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Red oblasts and blue oblasts

Thursday, 25 November 2004, 14:19

So you think the United States has a red-state-blue-state problem? Try red orange and blue Ukrainian oblasts:

Update: More detailed maps of this sort are now online.

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