By chance I was re-reading Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality, coming across this passage as an advertising van for the Partito Democratico passed by my window, with Walter Veltroni’s face plastered across it. “Are you objecting that advertising and propoganda cannot be compared, because one serves commerce and the other ideology? You understand nothing. Some one […]
Jacek Żakowski is what passes for a left winger here in Poland. In fact he’s regarded as practically a Bolshevik, while the organ he writes for, Polityka, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, is considered almost socialist. Despite his undeniably communistic credentials the final few sentences of a recent article about the politics of doing […]
A satirical cartoon in last Friday’s il manifesto, by one of Italy’s leading cartoonists Vauro, has caused something of an international incident – no mean feat, given the general apathy towards the Italian election campaign both at home and abroad. The cartoon, which pictures a loosely disguised Fiamma Nirenstein, a journalist and commentator running as […]
The health service was in such a jock here that they decided to have a so-called “white summit” of various interest groups – doctors, economists and so on. I can’t recall off hand the name of my representative there but anyway, they’ve come up with a plan to get the health service out of the […]
Gazeta Wyborcza is once again heroically forging the way forward in enlightening the benighted masses of Poland. This time the subject is GMOs. To the journalists’ dismay, most Poles don’t want them. In today’s paper Konrad Niklewicz has a short think piece on page two about the question: GW has been debating the subject for […]
The purpose of the mock exams taken last week by school leavers around Poland is to create the conditions of the real thing as closely as possible so the little darlings will be ready for the big day. Well, they certainly succeeded in keeping it real, in preparing children for the tough, hard future – […]
A week or two ago Tygodnik Powszechny described how Polish school leaving exams are marked. The example was given of a pupil who wrote that Adam Mickiewicz in one of his plays described the fate of Poles sent to Siberia during World War Two. Rather than scoring zero (Mickiewicz was a nineteenth century writer), the […]
The recent indictment of Sudanese President Omar al Bashir has brought the role and work of the ICC once again into the spotlight. Footage of thousands of Al Bashir supporters protesting against the decision on the streets of Khartoum does beg the question – can the ICC do anything right? The court at Le Hague […]
Much sniggering has been done internationally (and here in Italy) at the recent judgement by the Corte di Cassazione (or supreme court) that grasping one’s ‘attributi’ in public is an offence punishable by a fine. In a country where it’s a common superstition that grasping one’s ‘palle’ wards off bad-luck, this is bad news for […]