Europe

Land of ups and downs: Armenia

Capital city Yerevan with Mount Arafat in the background At Eastertide we usually go to unusual places in the pursuit of archaeology. This year it was the turn of Armenia, an unusual place perched in the Caucasus. It is slightly smaller than Belgium, with a population of around three million. […]

Pope champions marriage, family

Visiting Pope Benedict XVI yesterday urged Catholics to courageously defend the traditional family. The Pontiff, who celebrated an open-air Mass before hundreds of thousands of peopele on the second day of his visit to Croatia, warned couples cohabiting outside wedlock that living together was no substitute for marriage. “Dear families be […]

Radar reveals Greenland bedrock

by Marc-André Miserez, swissinfo.ch Antennas developed by Swiss scientists have sounded ice layers in Antarctica up to several kilometres thick, as well as the rocks underneath. This is of interest not only to geologists and climatologists attempting to measure the effects of global warming on Earth’s ice-covered regions, but also […]

Europe’s rising Islamophobia

The key voices of intolerance are neither marginal nor can they be dismissed as old-style far-right activists. They are today often heads of government, important ministers or powerful politicians. Their words express an emerging refrain of official xenophobia. Successive recent salvos by the French president and German chancellor on the failure […]

Dante Alighieri and Islam

By ROBERTA FEDELE Considered an emblem of the Christian Middle Ages and a central author of the Western tradition, Italian writer Dante Alighieri unintentionally reveals a lot about the influence of Islamic thought and models on Christian Europe. This is especially true of his masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy”, regarded as a prodigy […]

Non Means Non by Maureen Dowd (The NY Times – OP:ED)

In Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” an American writer clambers into a yellow vintage Peugeot every night and is transported back to hobnob with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gertrude Stein in the shimmering movable feast. The star-struck aspiring novelist from Pasadena, played by Owen Wilson, […]

Giant Ears on the British Coast

The enormous concrete shells are as tall as a house, and they were designed to listen for enemy aircraft in the 1920s and 30s. Pre-World War II acoustic experiments led to some extraordinary architecture — and to a remarkably effective technology which ultimately succumbed to the invention of radar. In […]

A Tale of Two Raids

by John Feffer They were both responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in causes they believed were righteous. They both occupied top spots on the World’s Most Wanted list. They were both the subject of raids that were years in the making and required extensive intelligence work. But in all […]

Protests divide Syrians in Switzerland

by Abdelhafidh Abdeleli, swissinfo.ch The protests and subsequent government crackdown are dividing opinion among Syrians watching events unfold from Switzerland. While some Syrians feel the protests are a consequence of the Arab Spring sweeping through North Africa, others say wider diplomatic forces are at work. Although all the Syrians who […]

Killer in the cage

Mladic’s capture signals that justice will eventually catch up with mass murderers SERBIA has finally “captured” the Serbian mass murderer Ratko Mladic. One of the three Butchers of Balkans — the other two being the late Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic — Mladic eluded international justice for 17 years although […]

Former Serbian commander Ratko Mladic is arrested

(CNN) — Police in Serbia have arrested former Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic, the highest-ranking war crimes suspect still at large from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Serbia’s president announced Thursday. “Today we arrested Ratko Mladic,” Serbian President Boris Tadic said. Tadic said Mladic was detained in Serbia. The […]