Like the British vis-à-vis the French, an influential current in Indonesian opinion remains convinced that the outside world is determined to destroy it with naughtiness. Some believe that, far from being innate or Islamic, the current bout of banning can be traced back to paranoia generated by the CIA’s attempts round 1960 to bring down…
Franco Alemán over at HispaLibertas has very kindly passed on this article. In it Chicago Tribune ombudsman Don Wycliff tells the sorry tale of how, following an alert from Tim Blair, they had to get rid of Uli Schmetzer. Schmetzer had been with the paper for 20 years, but when he was caught fabricating an…
Re this post, check this article from The Scotsman: A DRAMATIC surge in the number of Scots learning foreign languages has left night classes oversubscribed and academics lost for words. The Celtic thrawness that has seen Scotland languishing at the bottom of the European languages league is softening, and the country is becoming a nation…
John B (on John C’s comments) mentions the story doing the rounds about a video which, if it existed, might alarm Mr Rajoy’s more conservative following. What we need now is John A with a pirate version, or at least some decent fakes. (Does no one here know what Photoshop is really for?) Here, meanwhile,…
Giles Tremlett writes this morning in The Guardian that: Support for the Spanish People’s party government is ebbing away as concern about terrorism and separatism dominates the general election campaign, according to opinion polls published yesterday. In fact – apart from the blip in socialist support when the war started – there is no statistically…
Ronaldinho was following a venerable tradition when he broke a window in Santiago de Compostela’s cathedral while attempting a fancy kick for a TV spot. Bryan Griffiths tells us that back in 1330 the priest of Winkfield, William Pagula, wrote a Latin poem proposing an end to churchyard games: Bat & bares and suche play…