Discover Cultural Treasures

I've held onto these links for far, far too long.  My RSS feeds are the best.  I skim the headlines, click on what I want to learn more about, and get several points of view on an issue.  These links come from my feeds and touch on the cultural aspects of Europe.  It's been all politics and economics lately because I simply need a lot more time to research cultural points of interest.  The links are listed after the jump.

So We Extradited An Axe Murderer

So this happened.  I wish I could speak to international criminal justice laws, but that remains a large mystery to me.  It is suspicious, however, that there was a deal on the table with Azerbaijan and Hungary has been trying to wrangle itself "free" from the EU's political ambit.  Oh, and that it has to go through the EU to get IMF money to make their economy more stable.

The Balkan Express

I've been absent for a number of reasons, but I have also been making some serious investment in the Balkans.  Books have been on the agenda and they have not disappointed me.  I began my journey by checking out two books from the wonders of the public library: The Balkan Express by Slavenka Drakulic and Srebrenica: A Record of a War Crime by Jan Willem Honig.  They both have to do with the devastating Balkan Wars of the 1990s and both let me peer into the dark, dark world that existed during that time.

I'll start off with the wholly factual and report style Srebrenica.  I checked out this book mainly because the Mladić and Hadžić trials at the ICTY were making news and when my husband asked about the Balkan Wars, I embarrassingly knew nothing I could share with him.  I thought to start out with the Srebrenica massacre.  The book is a UN report on the massacre, which detailed exactly what happened and went into analysis in the following chapters.  It wasn't a fun read by any means, but it certainly horrified me.  Some of the essays in Drakulić's book really brought out this point (which made the pairing quite fortuitous): no one really seemed concerned with what happened in Yugoslavia.  The lip service was done, but the chain of command and the overwhelming sense of non-urgency pervades the entire event.

Ukrainian Performance Art

I was alerted to this article on a fascinating Ukrainian exhibit that's causing quite a bit of controversy.  The only real question I have is, "Does the performance continue past the initial stage of choosing?"  I feel like that's lifelong performance art.  I'm curious what other people think of the piece.

Hungarian Swimmer Honors Memory of Norwegian Rival

An article from WSJ's Emerging Europe blog:

The Olympics bring out the EU in Europe, I think.