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UpdatePosted October 29th
I apologise for the long delay in posting material to this blog. I've been busy in my new job as International Editor, as well as working the CEE beat and trying to hurry along my new book about Russian spies.
I have also put a lot of work into the new Economist blog, Eastern Approaches.
In the meantime, the Economist has changed its rules so that I now must wait for a month before posting articles in private mailings or on my own site, so that our website garners the maximum amount of traffic. I think this is an entirely reasonable stipulation given that the Economist shareholders paid for the article to be written in the first place!
What I am allowed to do is to alert people to the articles' existence. I do this on Facebook and Twitter. Anyone on this list who is on facebook is welcome to be my "friend" or to "follow" me on Twitter, where I am edwardlucas
You can look at my "twitter feed" here
The messages are a bit cryptic but you will soon get the gist. They include links to stories I have written in the Economist and elsewhere, and other interesting material. These links are usually shortened to something that looks like www.bit.ly/Abc123.
Here are some examples from my recent work on the absurd and damaging row between Poland and Lithuania
http://bit.ly/bPEVxQ war of words worsens between #poland and #lithuania. V tiresome
http://bit.ly/dedVTS new blog post on absurd damaging row between #poland and #lithuania
Poland, Lithuania and self-centredness -- http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2010/10/poland_and_lithuania
http://bit.ly/cbEE6E sad sharp article (in Polish) about looming lithuania-polish spelling fiasco row
23 Oct
- A major military training exercise including more than 1,700 US Polish and Baltic troops has begun in Latvia http://bit.ly/9O3qjZ
23 Oct
If you find facebook more convenient, the same material is there.
This will in ...
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THE fruits of Bill Bryson’s fluent and amusing writing have been fame and fortune, so he now lives in one of the most desirable dwellings in the world: an old rectory in an English country village. The social and technological history of this lovely old house is the theme of his latest book, published earlier this year in Britain and coming out in America next month.
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Even his friends do not claim that President Bronisław Komorowski is sparkling company. He speaks no foreign languages and has never lived abroad. He has no expertise in world affairs, no close friendships with foreign leaders. He is not Donald Tusk or Radek Sikorski. But he is a sensible man representing a country that matters. He will find no difficulty in gaining meetings and audiences.
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Quizzical, erudite and clear-sighted, Tony Judt never let matters rest. He worried at his own beliefs—Zionist, Francophile, socialist and Euro-federalist—until they fell apart and reformed under the pressure of his restless, meticulous intellect. Few people in the Anglo-Saxon world can call themselves “intellectuals”, continental-style, without feeling (and sounding) a little odd. But in Mr Judt’s case the word deserved a capital “I”.
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English is what matters. It has displaced rivals to become the language of diplomacy, of business, of science, of the internet and of world culture. Many more people speak Chinese—but even they, in vast numbers, are trying to learn English. So how did it happen, and why?
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IcelandPosted May 27th
Filthy, damp, cold and exhausting, living in Iceland for most of the past millennium had one redeeming feature: that the long dark winter evenings gave people the chance to read a lot and tell stories.
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Jokes helped make communism collapse. “Anekdoty” as they were termed, helped dispel the climate of fear and highlighted the backwardness and stagnation that were the hallmark of central planning and the police state. The best ones were about people like Brezhnev; few found Stalin a good subject for humour.
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Giving passports to these Hungarians, who now number around 2m, appeases the radical right in Hungary and also signals to other countries that the Magyar minorities have a protector. That does not matter much in places such as Serbia, Slovenia or Austria, where Magyars live happily alongside their fellow-citizens. But it is potentially explosive in Slovakia...
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In the communist era, the countries of eastern and central Europe were run by tightly knit clans. Connections, particularly those of your parents, mattered more than ability. The same kind of people held the top jobs in the ruling party, in government, in media and in commerce and industry. One of the most potent fuels for the revolutions of 1989 was public discontent with this closed system and the unfairness and incompetence that went along with it.
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I have also been made International Editor, starting in September. However I will continue to write on the east European region for the print edition of the Economist, as well as running a new blog called Eastern Approaches.
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