so the italians and the spanish are claiming that this year there are much less immigrants trying to enter europe via their shores, islands and outposts on the african mainland than last year. while this may be true this does neither mean that less people are dying on the atlantic or in the Mediterranean while […]

this weekend the el hema الهما project by mediamatic finally opend. the idea behind it is to create an arabic identity for the HEMA store chain (brand) which is about as dutch as it can get. the project had gotten quite a bit of media attention as HEMA had been so stupid to threaten to […]

for some reason have kept a google news alert for this article in my inbox over the last week: 18 clandestine migrants were saved from a shipwreck, by Algeria II passenger-ship. A well-informed source told El Khabar that the clandestine migrants were attempting to reach the Mediterranean northern bank. They were handed over Tuesday to […]

spend two days at my parents place in east germany this weekend and yesterday my dad suddenly came up and insisted on reading us a short excerpt from the complete works of Heinrich von Kleist. It is a short note that he wrote in october 1810 as editor of the ‘Berliner Abendblättern’, where it was […]

ran into some amazing slideshows in the last couple of days which somehow remind me of my trip to Dubai, India and China (see here) late last year. first, the New York Times (which apparently is one and a half inches less wide these days) has a beautiful slideshow from construction sites in Dubai (see […]

just read a fairly impressive speech on terrorism by US presidential candidate (technically he is a candidate for nomination as a candidate) Barack Obama. The speech it is quite a contrast to what you hear from the current US administration and for large parts actually makes sense even though it contains a fair share of […]