Then what most people expected happened. Alexei Navalny was arrested by the police shortly after the plane landed at Moscow airport this evening. Allegedly, he was arrested for violating the reporting requirement that was part of the release condition from a previous sentence. Navalny returned to Russia after his stay in Germany following an…
The first large-scale protest against communism that the Soviet Union stood for in Eastern Europe took place in Hungary in 1956. The nationwide protests started on 23 October and lasted until the Soviet invasion on 10 November. The riots started with thousands of students in Budapest taking to the streets and marching towards the…
This is a documentary film that is not new. It was released on Netflix in 2015. But the nature of the movie is such that you have to see it. Especially if you are about to forget what happened in Ukraine in the winter of 2013-14, or if you simply want a reminder of…
The relationship between the 2nd US President John Adams and his successor Thomas Jefferson was characterized by friendship, unfriendliness and mutual respect. These are two of the USA’s most central presidents throughout history and both were central when the USA’s Declaration of Independence was written. They died on the exact same day, on the…
Far from Europe’s attention lies a refugee camp much larger than the camps we have in Europe. Equally, the 900,000 refugees in the Cox’s Bazar camp in Bangladesh receive little attention. A refugee disaster worse than we can imagine. In the camp are refugees from Myanmar, there are the Rohingya people, a Muslim ethnic…
If you are king and die, the bier is escorted through the streets of the capital while a grieving people mourn their king. For Leopold II’s funeral in Brussels on 22 December 1909 it was different, when the people stood to show their displeasure when the bier passed. Why such an unpopular king? Yes,…