Iraqi officials have discovered that they may have an air force, after all.

The Defense Ministry revealed Sunday that it recently learned that Iraq owns 19 Russian-designed MIG-21 and MIG-23 jet fighters, which are in storage in Serbia. The ministry said Iraqi officials are negotiating with the Serbs to restore the aircraft.

The Serbian government has tentatively promised to make two of the aircraft available “for immediate use,” according to a press release from the ministry. The rest would be restored on a rush basis, the ministry said.

• 3 Quarks Daily blogs about a worrying rumour that the founder of mercenary company Blackwater has been killing witnesses against him.


• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason questions whether or not the modern world's predilection for safety is good or paralyzing.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the search for fragments of the planetismal which hit Earth and so created the moon, a bizarrely large low-density gas giant, and evidence of a massive planetary collision a hundred light years away.


• Far Outliers comments on the extent to which Xinjiang has been only loosely held by China.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros reports on the lawsuit lodged against a Greek journalist who documented a long history of complicity with Milosevic's Serbia and its atrocities, while Edward Lucas takes apart claims that rising HDI indices correspond to rising fertility rates.


• Hunting Monsters examines the problems facing the near-country of Kosovo.


• Joe. My. God lets us know that New York City coffeehouses are cracking down on WiFi users who just occupy space after their first cup.


• Language Log considers
  
• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley reviews book examining Italy's disastrous performance in the First World War.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that the discrepancies in life exptancies between the United States and countries with socialized medicine can be more than accounted for by better habits among non-Americans.


• Slap Upside the Head announces that an Ontario political candidate who talked about the need to kill gay people was convicted of inciting hatred, and examines the claim of a Malaysian doctor that gay sex makes one more susceptible to swine flu.


• Spacing Toronto's Shawn Micallef reminisces about the old Toronto beach area of Sunnyside.


• Strange Maps features the first road map of the United Kingdom.


• Towleroad points to the Crazy of many of the opponents to Obama's health-care plan.


• Will Baird reports on a massive tropical storm on Saturn's atmosphere-heavy moon Titan.


• Window on Eurasia reports on a children's book driven by Tatar nationalism.

• 3 Quarks Daily's Robin Varghese wonders if Google is killing individuals' ability to recognize even basic things.


• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason photographs the busiest highway in Canada, the 401, at its busiest.


• 'Aqoul notes that Algeria's latest economic policies look very bad and that there were recently riots between Chinese migrants and Algerians.


• blogTO's Derek identifies the most unsafe roads for cyclists in Toronto, with the commenters throwing in their own suggestions.


• Daniel Drezner writes about the current system of international relations as if it was The Birthday Club.


• Demography Matters' Aslak Berg writes about the very difficult situation faced by an arguably already overpopulated Yemen still seeing high population growth, and Claus links to a video on human evolution and wonders how sub-replacement fertility is evolutionarily adaptive.


• Far Outliers links to an article arguing that where Indonesia is a successful emerging pluralistic democracy and economic power Burma is doing nearly the exact opposite.


• A Fistful of Euros' Douglas Muir reports that the aftermath of the sale of Serbia's oil company to Gazprom is going as well as one could expect.


• Hunting Monsters reports on the phantom country of Nagorno-Karabakh.


• Inkless Wells' Paul Wells reports on the latest in a series of polls demonstrating that contrary to mythology, Québécois--especially Francophones--are more likely to support strict jail sentences for criminals that many English Canadians elsewhere.


• Language Hat reports that an Indonesian tribe is adopting Korea's hangul script for their language, the first time ever, apparently, that hangul has been used for a language other than Korean.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Dave Brockington memorializes the late filmmaker John Hughes of 1980s fame.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio discusses his participation in a Slate series examining how the United States could collapse.


• Slap Upside the Head celebrates the fact that a woman who said that British Columbia's school system discriminated against non-heterosexual children by not providing so-called "reparative therapy" had her complaint dismissed.


• Strange Maps hosts an unusual early modern map that shows Europe upside down. Literally.


• Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales wonders (1, 2) if the Russian elite has decided to adopt Huntington's clash of civilization theory and make Russia into the central state of Orthodox civilization.


• Noel Maurer reports on a Brazilian plan for a high-speed rail link that actually makes sense economically.


• The Vanity Press reports on the fact that a faked birth certificate actually belonging to Obama was actually an editing version of South Australian David Jeffrey Bomford.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that many of the small peoples of Russia's Middle Volga region are upset with Moscow's centralizing and potentially even assimilatory policies, and argues that the Abkhazian/South Ossetian precedent might encourage the peoples of the Russian North Caucasus to break away.

Stewart starred as Nick Slaughter, a pony-tailed, hairy-chested private investigator who worked on an island, amid beautiful women in bikinis. He was embarrassed by his acting on the “cheesy show” – which he describes as “a B-version of Magnum, P.I.” and which lasted for only three seasons – until he logged onto Facebook last December and found a fan group called “Tropical Heat/Nick Slaughter” with some 17,000 (mostly Serbian) followers.

[. . .]

With his neighbour, artist and neophyte filmmaker Marc Vespi, and Vespi's sister, Liza, Stewart went to Serbia last month to film a documentary called Slaughter Nick for President that explores his superstar alter ego.

In Belgrade, they were met with public hysteria. A series of media scrums awaited their arrival, along with groups of fans in tropical shirts (Slaughter's wardrobe staple). Photographers snapped away and then jumped in front of the cameras themselves to get a picture with their national hero.

The anticipation in Serbia had been building since March, when it was leaked to the press that Stewart would perform with a Serbian punk band at its 20th-anniversary concert. “It broke out all over the papers that Nick Slaughter was coming to Serbia,” says Stewart. “It was overwhelming.”

Stewart's Serbian host, prominent political activist Srdja Popovic – whom Stewart had contacted through Facebook – says that after a national newspaper published a photo of him with Stewart, “within 15 minutes, I got 300 calls – everybody asking, ‘Will you introduce me to Nick Slaughter?' and ‘I want a photo with Nick Slaughter.' I couldn't live my normal life.”

Before 1991, former Yugoslavs enjoyed visa-free travel since the mid-1960s, unlike the nations of what used to be communist Eastern Europe. Generations of Serbs grew up travelling freely abroad, but the young now are almost completely unaware of the benefit.

"It was ok to go to Italy for a weekend when I was young," Bogdan Stevovic (54), a Belgrade teacher, told IPS. "However, my 19-year-old son does not know what it looks like. For a week's holiday in Greece he had to queue the whole night in front of the Greek embassy just to submit his visa request in the morning."

[. . .]

[Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo] were omitted from the EC list for visa-free travel. "These countries have not yet fulfilled the conditions," the EC said in its statement. That meant they had not introduced biometric passports, secured their borders or engaged in a fight against organised crime. Visa-free travel for them could be re-examined by mid-2010, the EC statement said.

There was fierce reaction in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the EC move was viewed as a political message primarily for Bosniak Muslims, who are the largest ethnic group, that suffered the biggest losses in the 1992-95 war, mostly at the hands of Bosnian Serbs.

"It's further discrimination against us Bosniaks," Sarajevo resident Mirsad Juzbasic told IPS on the phone. "It's a shame after what happened here during the war. We'll remain in a kind of a ghetto."

It's different for Bosnian Croats and Serbs. Both are able to obtain passports from their ethnic mother countries, meaning they can hold dual Bosnian and Croat, or Bosnian and Serb citizenship.

Many Bosnian Croats opted for Croatian passports as far back as the mid- 1990s because Croatia was exempt from the visa introduction in 1991.

Bosnian Serbs have realised now that it's easy for them to obtain Serbian passports. "The only problem is we have to wait for Serbian citizenship for 15 months," Jelena Stojkovic (24) told IPS on phone from Banja Luka, capital of Republika Srpska, the ethnic Serb entity within Bosnia. "But it will be good for us. We can see what Europe looks like now."

Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, who declared independence in what Serbia officially considers its southern province in February 2008, are regarded by Serbia as its citizens, but Serbia is unable to provide biometric passports because it has no jurisdiction over the province – even if the ethnic Albanians would want to travel on a Serbian passport.

[T]he last Yugo, once the pride of communist Yugoslavia's automobile industry, will roll off its Serbian production line today in the central town of Kragujevac.

It will be missed here--but probably not in America.

Soon after it hit the U.S. markets in 1986, selling for just $3,990 (U.S.), the boxy Yugo was derided by American car magazines "as barely qualifying as a car" and "an assembled bag of nuts and bolts."

U.S. owners complained of frequent engine failures and transmission problems--with the manual gear sticks sometimes detaching and ending up in their drivers' hands--in addition to passenger doors and trim parts going AWOL.

When the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted crash tests of 23 compacts in 1986, the car with the worst results was the Yugo, with $2,197 worth of damage in slow speed crashes against a flat barrier.

Still, more than 100,000 Yugo GVs--standing for Great Value--were sold in the U.S. before Yugo America, the company that imported it, went bankrupt and Washington imposed economic sanctions on Belgrade for fomenting ethnic wars in the Balkans in 1992.

It is not easy for Ireya Alborova to root through the events that cracked this city in half, but one small bright memory stands out from 1989, when she glanced at the building across the street from her high school and spotted a flag.

[. . .]

In the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, some 50 miles to the southeast, Georgia’s first post-Soviet leader was emerging. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a longtime anti-Soviet dissident, based his campaign for the presidency on a vaulting Georgian nationalism — an idea powerful enough to fill the vacuum left by Communism’s collapse.

The platform, known as Georgia for the Georgians, cast ethnic Georgians, who made up 70 percent of the population, as the country’s true masters. Mr. Gamsakhurdia derided South Ossetians as newcomers, saying they had arrived only 600 years ago and as tools of the Soviet Union.

On the street in Tskhinvali, small changes began to appear.

Ms. Alborova’s aunt was exasperated to go to the store and see that pasta manufactured in Russia had been put in packages labeled with Georgian script. Her neighbor Emma Gasiyeva kept hearing slogans: “Brush them out with a broom!” and “Who are the guests, and who are the hosts?” a reference to the theory that Ossetians had been brought to the area as agricultural workers.

The government in Tbilisi established Georgian as the country’s principal language, enraging the Ossetians, whose first two languages were Russian and Ossetian. A few months later, more than 10,000 Georgian demonstrators were transported to Tskhinvali in buses and encircled the city, until they were repelled by Ossetian irregulars and Soviet troops. A true war began in 1991, when thousands of Georgian soldiers entered Tskhinvali. The city was shelled almost nightly from the Georgian-held highlands, and Medeya Alborova recalls holding pillows over her teenage daughters’ heads, as if that could protect them.

When Mrs. Alborova got to Tbilisi to see her relatives, it was like stepping into a parallel universe. She sat with them watching news on Georgian television, as the announcer recited a litany of crimes committed by Ossetians against Georgians. At times, she said, she was not sure she was on the right side of the conflict.

While the Czechs debate the merits of the Lisbon Treaty, Serbia’s dark side was back in the news last month with the capture of fugitive war crimes suspect Radovan Karadžić.

Not too long ago, things were much different. If I hadn’t personally witnessed the situation as it was and is (in both Serbia and the Czech Republic), it would be hard to believe, but I have, and it seems clear that roles have been reversed.

A friend from Belgrade speaks of an acquaintance, a Serb from Novi Sad who went to Czechoslovakia — some three decades ago, able to travel with the so-called “red Yugoslav passport” — and fell in love with a girl. The couple promptly got married and moved back to Novi Sad to settle down. She soon gave birth to a baby boy. A few years passed and she received Yugoslav citizenship and the valuable red passport. Within months, she was off with her new travel papers, leaving husband and child forever, never to be heard from again.

Today, a Czech seeking Serbian citizenship would be considered insane. The Czech Republic is a part of the European Union and faring well, all things considered. Serbia, on the other hand, has in the past few decades gone through at least four wars and remains mired in conservative nationalism and religion. Since communism’s collapse, the two countries have gone completely separate ways. Czechs chose progress; Serbs chose madness. The diverging paths emerged quickly, leading to the questions: How did this happen? What’s next for Serbia? Are their lessons to be learned from the Czech path?

• Kalinga Seneviratne in "Population Decline - Enter the Matchmaker" takes a look at how, instead of doing anything to alleviate conditions of gender inequality and economic hardship that help discourage family formation, the Singaporean government is trying to promote matchmakers as a useful new tool for boosting the birth rate.


• Zoltán Dujisin's "How the Hawks Won" makes a direct connection between Saakaashvili's recently increasing authoritarianism at home and his recent appalling poor performance in the recent war in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. If those two territories-soon-to-be-countries distrusted Georgina promises before ...


• Mario Osava in "The Complications of Coming into Sudden (Oil) Wealth" examines how Brazilians and their government are thinking about regulating the revenues set to be produced by Brazil's massive new offshore oil. Demagoguery is a well-justified fear.


• Zoltán Dujisin in "Russian Language Toned Down: takes a look at recent trend in language policy and use in Ukraine, where education and other government facilities has been steadily Ukrainianized even as most of the mass media and business remain Russophone, and knowledge and use of the Ukrainian language are growing particularly among the young and in southern Ukraien. (After the fall of the Soviet Union Russophones and Ukrainopphones were roughly equally as numerous.)


• Vesna Peric Zimonjic writes ("Uneasy Over the Kosovo Parallel With Georgia") about how public opinion in Serbia, while broadly supportive of Russia, are concerned about the certain associations that the precedent of recognizing the independence of a territory liberated by foreign intervention from ethnic cleansing and a threatened genocide have with their own recent history. Kosovars, for their part, deny the relevance of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to their situation.


• Lowana Veal's "Filling Up on Hydrogen" takes a look at how, thanks in no small measure to cheap and abundant geothermal energy, hydrogen-fuelled cars and boats are starting to appeal in some number.

[I]s this a simple-minded decision, reflecting a vulgar stereotype of Serbs as violent thugs with a taste for organized crime, ignorant peasants who are thrown into culture shock in the modern world? Or is it an inspired choice, allowing the writers to make the protagonist character more complex and morally ambiguous, and position him as a "fish out of water" observer of the madness that’s modern American street life?

Note that Niko Bellic is not inherently evil. Nor unsympathetic. In fact, you can play him as a hero, albeit a rather noir one. (Yes, you can also go around killing people at random, but that’s your problem, not Niko’s.) And he’s presented as likable, and even--in the first few episodes--somewhat innocent.

On the other hand, providing the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto is not exactly a point of national pride. Niko is now the planet’s most famous Serb, and he’s a small-time crook with issues.

Pro-Western forces in Serbia began tough talks on Monday to cobble together a coalition, after the electoral commission confirmed they scored an upset poll victory over nationalist rivals.

President Boris Tadic's "For a European Serbia" alliance garnered 38.8 percent in Sunday's parliamentary elections dominated by the issue of Serbian ties with the European Union.

While short of an absolute majority, the alliance was well ahead of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party on 29.2 percent, said the commission.

There had been predictions of a possible nationalist backlash over widespread EU support for the independence of Serbia's breakaway province of Kosovo.

In the end, the result "undoubtedly confirmed a clear European path," Tadic said at his Democratic Party campaign headquarters.

"The Democratic Party will be the key player in the future cabinet," said the president, refusing to reveal who might be his prime minister.

"The negotiations will not be easy (but) I warn everyone not to play with the electoral will of the citizens and try to take Serbia back to the isolation of the 1990s," he said in reference to the hardline regime of late president Slobodan Milosevic.

The Democrats' expected coalition partners include the Socialist Party of Serbia, founded by Milosevic, and/or the Liberal Democratic Party, whose leader Cedomir Jovanovic negotiated the late strongman's arrest in 2001.

Canada on Tuesday formally recognized Kosovo's independence, but stressed it was not setting a precedent to be exploited by the Quebec separatist movement.

The move swiftly triggered an angry response from Belgrade which recalled its ambassador to Ottawa in protest, as world powers called for calm after some of the worst violence since Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia last month.

"Today, we joined the international community and recognized Kosovo as a new state," Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier told public broadcaster CBC, a day after Serbs clashed with UN police in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica.

However, Bernier made it clear that Kosovo's new nation status was a "unique case" which would have no bearing on the aspirations of Quebec nationalists to split from the rest of Canada.

"As the declaration issued by Kosovo's parliament also makes clear, the unique circumstances which have led to Kosovo's independence mean it does not constitute any kind of precedent," Bernier said in a statement.

"Statements made by other countries recognizing Kosovo's independence have echoed this point."

"You cannot compare that with Quebec," he told CBC.

Predrag Raznatovic quickly reads aloud through the part of the history book that states thousands of Montenegrins were killed by Serbs in 1918. He doesn’t believe what he is saying, but he reads it anyway. He is a history teacher.

Raznatovic, who has been teaching for 15 years in Podgorica, uses a relatively new textbook to teach the history of a relatively new country. Although he acknowledges that a history textbook is "a stamp of its time," he argues that "the main agenda of education should be education."

The history teacher and other critics of the new books say they sideline world figures in order to focus on Montenegro and that they distort the history of Serbia, with which Montenegro formed a federation for nearly a century.

The books’ defenders, however, say they are a good-faith attempt to shine a light on Montenegro’s long-overlooked national history.

"These school books are not good for our situation," Raznatovic said. "It’s not good for the future of the relationships between Montenegro and Serbia. "Nationalism is always a really big danger."

Alen Abdomerovic disagrees. At 20, Abdomerovic grew up during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the history he learned changed along with the circumstances. Now a proud citizen of a newly independent Montenegro, he said a certain amount of nationalism is appropriate in a country trying to define itself.

Arguing that Serb nationalism swept through the region in the early 1990s, he said, "Now it is Montenegrin nationalism. I think it’s OK for now."

Nor does he have a problem with that nationalism being promoted in textbooks. "I think it’s OK. I think every book you write, it’s good to write pro-something or anti-something to promote something," he said.</i>

"Noisy" doesn’t even begin to describe this track; heavy drums, buzzsaw synths, distorted guitars, and guttural, screaming vocals turn this into the most cacophonous Björk track I’ve ever heard. But cacophonous doesn’t always mean bad; in this case, it actually means brilliant. All the noise melds into a superb dance beat, and the simple, chant-like lyrics work their way into your subconscious, until you’re unknowingly repeating them along with Björk.

Declare Independence is going to be the most controversial track on Volta; it’s probably going to be the most controversial Björk track ever. So far there’s a very clean split between fans. Some love it, some hate it, but barely any don’t feel strongly about it one way or the other.

Icelandic singer Bjork has ignited criticism from Chinese fans after she declared "Tibet! Tibet!" to end a passionate performance of her song "Declare Independence" during a concert in Shanghai.

The outburst at the finale of Bjork's Sunday-night concert drew rare public attention inside China to Beijing's rule over Tibet.

Bjork's statement was not reported in Chinese news media but online sites were aflame with angry comment after word leaked out.

"If she really did this, then this woman really makes people throw up," one comment on popular Chinese website www.Sina.com said.

Some at the Shanghai concert said the politically tinged finale made audience members uneasy.

"The atmosphere was very strange, uncomfortable compared to the rest of the concert," said audience member Stephen Gow, a British teacher who lives in Shanghai.

People didn't boo, Gow said, but they left the Shanghai International Gymnastic Centre hurriedly.

Officials at the China-based company promoting the concert, Emma Ticketmaster, said they had no comment.

• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism wonders if the European Union, free from the United States' baggage and much closer than China, could give a post-Castro Cuba some sort of protectorate status.


• The Lounsbury at 'Aqoul observes that al-Jazeerah's coverage of the Kosovo independence celebrations included more than a few pairings of Kosovar and American flags. Good public relations?


• At Crooked Timber, Christ Bertram's celebratory post on Castro and John Quiggin's more measured consideration of dictatorship might both have generated more heat than light, but there's still enough of the latter there. If you page past the flamewars, that is.


• Ken MacLeod speculates that Technocracy and science fiction are too close for comfort.


• Joel at Far Outliers has had a few good Timothy Garton Ash excerpts, including one on Belgrade in 1997, one in Sarajevo in 1995, and one in Kosovo in 1998, one on Bosnia in 1998, and finally, a personal view of Yugoslavia's murder.


• At Joe. My. God, Rupert Everett is quoted as saying that pride marches have become depoliticized. The blogger and many commenters disagree.


• In the aftermath of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to Australian Aborigines, Language Log has its own take on the situation, touching upon Australian Aborigine languages.


• normblog blogs about Castro's unsurprisingly long period in office and his appropriation of the word "amor."


• Strange Maps describes the Republic of New Netherlands, population 31.2 million.

Facts were scarce amid the delierium, but were hardly the point. Truth was a necessary casualty of this mobilization, and its medium was myth. When one Djordje Martinovic claimed in 1985 that two Kosovars had raped him with a broken bottle, he became a national martyr, an archetype of Serb suffering and Albanian (Muslim, Ottoman ...) evil. A poetry likened him to the Serb rebels impaled by the Turks of old. In due course the courts and medical examiners agreed the man was unbalanced and his wounds were self-inflicted; but who cared?

A Croatian journalist investigated the many allegations that Serb and Montenegrin women were being raped in Kosovo. Records showed no disproportion among Albanian and Slav criminality in the province, and a lower than average number of rapes. Researchers in Belgrade bore the journalist out; but by the time their dull book of statistics was published in 1990, who cared?

If the official figures proved that hundreds of thousands of refugees had not crept over the border from Albania, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins had not been scared into fleeing the province, who cared? There was no separatist movement of any substance, but who cared? The Kosovars' weary insistence that separatism was not the issue, only confirmed their perfidy (129-130).

Strong economic growth forecasts, continued flows of remittances from Serbs working abroad--often used to finance homebuilding--and Serbia’s gradual progress toward membership in the European Union all make Windisch optimistic about the domestic building materials market.

While Serbian economic officials talk frequently about attracting "greenfield" investors, many foreign investors have opted for a less dramatic entry into the southeast European market of 8 million.

"Brownfield" investment in existing factories, warehouses or other industrial assets is a faster, lower-cost way to seek earnings from the former Yugoslavia’s massive, if decayed, industrial capacity.

Weinerberger first set up a Serbian sales office at the end of 2006 and last month purchased 100 percent of IGM Backa Nova, the local private company behind the Mali Idjos brick factory. The price, though undisclosed, was right for a "mid-sized old plant" with "a reliable basis for development," Windisch says.

Far from crumbling or moth-balled, the Mali Idjos plant with 50 workers reported revenues of 2 million euros last year. Weinerberger intends to hire 100 more workers.

Nowhere is successful "brownfield" investment more prevalent in Serbia than in Vojvodina. Weinerberger’s investment is one of countless examples in the northern autonomous province, traditionally the country’s strongest industrial area.

Since October 2000, Vojvodina has regained fiscal autonomy from Belgrade. More recently, since May 2004 when the EU launched its waves of enlargement into post-communist Europe, Vojvodina has gained common borders with two EU countries, Hungary and Romania.

"Vojvodina is from our point of view a market with prospects of good development in the future," Windisch says.

For a long time, there has been an academic controversy over whether the Serbs or the Hungarians were the land's original inhabitants. In 1918, the region became part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia, but until then it had been part of the Hapsburgs' Austrian Empire.

Proud of their Hapsburg, Central European culture, the residents of Vojvodina distance themselves from the rest of Serbia, feeling closer cultural affinity to Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary and other former Hapsburg areas. One ethnologist found the Vojvodinian ideal to be fini ljudi, in other words, cultured and civilized. Vojvodinians put their fini ljudi concept in diametric opposition to their prejudice of the uncivilized "Balkan" types to the south.

Vojvodina became an autonomous province of Serbia under the terms of the 1974 constitution, together with Kosovo and Metohija. De jure, it was still part of the republic of Serbia, but de facto, it functioned as a full-fledged republic. Five nationalities were accorded the status of "titular nationality:" Serbs, Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians and Rusyns.