Posted by jfb on May 6th, 2009 |
0 comments
Haven’t checked in on Georgia for a while. What a mess.
The European Union has finally decided that it can’t accomplish anything in the Middle East, so maybe it should pay some attention to, y’know, Europe:
“There are new priorities on the agenda which were not so obvious last year, including the need to stabilize these countries, which are moving from one crisis to another,” said Nicu Popescu, a research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The focus is less on structural adjustments or institution-building and more on crisis management.”
And file this one under “what could possibly go wrong?”
abkhazia . arctic . georgia . nukes . ossetia . politics
Posted by jfb on March 26th, 2009 |
0 commentsBeen a long time since we checked in on the remaining Republic of Georgia, eh? Long story short: Georgians stuck by President Saakashvili during the war and immediately after, but now that it’s clear that Georgia got pwned, the opposition is heating up. Can the government remember it’s on the side of democracy, or will it crack down? Meanwhile, the Russians (I almost typed “Soviets”) are digging in in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan — and despite all the dreaming and planning that’s gone on there, it’s unlikely to be Washington — will have the upper hand in whatever’s to come, and there’s not a terrorist in the world, or even a long war, that can change that.
And this:
abkhazia . arctic . georgia . ossetia . pipelines
Posted by jfb on November 25th, 2008 |
0 commentsI’m busy packing tonight, so here’s a quick crawl through the post-soviet periphery and a couple other things.
arctic . black sea . bosnia . georgia . kosovo . moldova . north caucasus . oil . ossetia . ukraine
Posted by jfb on November 17th, 2008 |
0 commentsI wish I could embed this video for you- it’s a giant shark taking a dump. No, really.
Shark-cam captures ocean motion
It is as thick as your arm, gungy and smells disgusting – and it has just been caught on camera for what is thought to be the first time.
Whalers slip out of Japanese port
Lunar Images From Chandrayaan-1
Controllers Cheer as Data Arrive from NASA’s Spirit Rover
What to Get Space Station on 10th Anniversary — a Name
Physicist admits sending US space know-how to China
Pirates capture Saudi oil tanker
Somali pirates release cargo ship
US Admiral ‘stunned’ by pirates’ reach
Georgia: Russian drone explodes, killing 2 soldiers and wounding 8 near S. Ossetian border
South Ossetian gunmen withdraw from disputed village: Sarkozy
Macedonia Takes Greece to World Court
Protests against UN, EU in Kosovo planned
Ancient Greeks pre-empted Dead Parrot sketch
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it.”
For those who believe the ancient Greeks thought of everything first, proof has been found in a 4th century AD joke book featuring an ancestor of Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch where a man returns a parrot to a shop, complaining it is dead.
The 1,600-year-old work entitled “Philogelos: The Laugh Addict,” one of the world’s oldest joke books, features a joke in which a man complains that a slave he has just bought has died, its publisher said Friday.
“By the gods,” answers the slave’s seller, “when he was with me, he never did any such thing!”
georgia . iss . kosovo . macedonia . military space . moon . ossetia . pirates . sea shepherd . space . weird
