Note: Other than the fact that (1) George Bush is no longer US President and (2) Jean-Claude Juncker is available, if asked… other than those two facts, my post in Avuncular American of 14 March 2008 still stands: “Europe’s First President: Charisma vs. Competence?” Oh yes, and this: the idea that David Miliband [...]
Brussels was the venue of a very important human rights conference this past week, but it took place in an academic setting, out of the spotlight but hopefully not entirely unnoticed.
ULB’s conference on 20 October, “Terrorism Lists, Executive Powers, and Human Rights,” organised by the European Centre for Constitutional & Human Rights” (ECCHR), aimed very [...]
Europe is in Eurasia…
It wouldn’t be autumn in Brussels without its slew of conferences to welcome the city’s “policy wonks” back from a long summer of frivolity. This week’s all-day conclave devoted to “The New European Parliament: What Priorities for Foreign Affairs, Security, and Defence?” covered a lot of ground, especially when the subtitle [...]
24 hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Middle East peace is “impossible” and, especially helpfully in case that message appeared overly pessimistic, that many countries “have learned to live with” a permanent state of war, the Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama.
The President’s personal honor [...]
Note: This article appears in the current issue of “Together Magazine,” a Brussels bi-monthly distributed among the European institutions. For a change, it’s not really political, since the general theme of the issue was luxury. Enjoy your weekend!
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Luxury – especially if its antonym is “discomfort” – cannot surely be all bad. Carried [...]
When you fly into Prague on Czech Airlines, they start playing The Moldau, Bedrich Smetana’s bucolic ode to his country, from Má vlast (My Country), his set of 19th century symphonic poems. You can almost hear the river Vltava flowing.
Now, I’m no Czech nationalist, in fact I find it awkward to even pronounce the [...]
Irish, American, and Errant European, Gerald Loftus was a diplomat from 1979 to 2002, and worked in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Settled in Brussels, his blog “Avuncular American” looks at America and the world from Europe. more.
