Europe

News from Europe

The bizarre, unhealthy, blinding media contempt for Julian Assange

The Guardian: Earlier this week, British lawyer and legal correspondent for the New Statesman David Allen Green generated a fair amount of attention by announcing that he would use his objective legal expertise to bust what he called "legal myths about the Assange extradition." These myths, he said, are being irresponsibly spread by Assange defenders and "are like 'zombie facts' which stagger on even when shot down."


The Dis-United Kingdom

Race riots, poverty, and violence in the United Kingdom. Bradford is at the heart of the UK and it was once the wealthiest city in Britain, riding the wave of the industrial revolution, its mills churning out textiles that dressed the world. But Great Britain is no longer the great empire that it once was, and today, the city of Bradford is not defined by industrial or political power but by poverty, inequality and social decline. Full story


Secret history reveals U.S. was haven for Nazis

Montreal Gazette: Newly revealed "secret history" written by U.S. officials has detailed how successive administrations provided refuge to Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of the Second World War. "America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted became -in some small measure -a safe haven for the persecutors as well," said a report from the Office of Special Investigations, first revealed by the New York Times.
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Iceland top country for gender equality

BBC: Iceland remains the country that has the greatest equality between men and women, according to an annual report by the World Economic Forum (WEF). It is the second year in succession that Iceland has topped the foundation's Global Gender Gap Report. Nordic nations dominate the top of the list of 134 countries, with Norway in second place and Finland third. The report measures equity in the areas of politics, education, employment and health.
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Christopher Hitchens: Why Kosovo still matters

National Post: The impressive decision last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague — to reject the claim submitted by Serbia that Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence was unlawful — was mostly either ignored or reported in articles festooned with false alarmism about hypothetical future secessions. Allow this precedent, moaned many, and what is to stop, say, Catalonia from breaking away?

This line of thinking is wrong twice.

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David Cameron becomes Britain's PM

The Independent: David Cameron has become Britain's youngest Prime Minister in almost 200 years as the head of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition which was agreed during a day of extraordinary drama in Westminster. The new coalition is Britain's first since the Second World War. Mr Cameron's 23-strong Cabinet will include five Liberal Democrats, giving the party their first taste of real power for 70 years. Nick Clegg, their leader, becomes Deputy Prime Minister.


Audio/Video of Gordon Brown's gaffe

Gordon Brown had what seemed like a pleasant exchange with a longstanding Labour supporter while he was wearing a mic. In the exchange, the woman made mention of hordes of Eastern Europeans immigrating to Britain. Afterward, forgetting that he was still being recorded, he made reference to the woman being a bigot. It seems to me that Brown was just telling it like it is, but he is being punished for it.
full video


Poland suffers tragedy

NY Times: Far from aggravating frictions in Russian-Polish relations, as initially feared, the plane crash that killed Poland’s president and a swath of the upper echelon of politicians and military leaders on Saturday appears to have achieved the opposite effect, encouraging kindness and understanding on both sides. Whether thesympathy develops into a new era of cooperation or evaporates with the first concrete dispute, it is a chance that politicians say must be seized.


Is this the smoking gun for the catholic church?

The Globe: More than a decade before police got wind that a priest had molested several altar boys in small towns in the Ottawa Valley, Vatican and Canadian church officials knew about the matter and discussed in a letter how to keep it secret. The letter, written in 1993, focused on protecting the church’s image by preventing the scandal from becoming public – the very essence of an international wave of allegations now battering the Roman Catholic clergy and the Vatican. “It is a situation which we wish to avoid at all costs,” the late Bishop Joseph Windle of Pembroke, Ont., wrote in Feb.


"How much did the Pope know?"

Macleans: Two Sundays before Easter, Pope Benedict XVI sent a 4,700-word “pastoral letter” to the Roman Catholic faithful of Ireland. Read in full from the pulpits of every church in the country, the note was the Vatican’s official response to two Irish investigations, which revealed—yet again—that pedophile priests had preyed on helpless children, and that certain self-serving bishops had moved heaven and earth to cover up the truth.