Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 42

I met Her Majesty the Queen once, at St. James’s Palace, at a diplomatic gathering I was attending in my part-time role of foreign minister’s wife. At the equivalent American event — at, say, the party the president throws every year at the U.N. General Assembly in New York — the foreign diplomats stand in line, shake the president’s hand, have their picture taken and are then rapidly ushered away. But when you meet the queen, you are at a fake cocktail party. You are standing in a small grou...

TRIPOLI

If you didn’t know what lay behind the gates of the vast structure in Janzour, just outside the Libyan capital, you’d probably assume it was the Libyan Naval Academy. That, after all, is what it used to be. But drive past the empty main building and into the former living quarters, and you won’t see any sailors. Laundry hangs from the balconies. Children play in the dust below. Women in black abayas walk up and down the concrete plazas, while elderly men in long white gowns smoke cigar...

Congratulations are due to the new president of France: Francois Hollande finished off Nicolas Sarkozy on Sunday with a few percentage points to spare. Congratulations of another sort are due to Syriza, also known as the Coalition of the Radical Left, a party that made major gains in Sunday’s Greek parliamentary elections, as well as Golden Dawn, a party whose symbol looks like a swastika and whose candidates earned enough votes to enter the Greek Parliament for the first time. Further congra...

During a democratic election, we journalists usually cover certain bases. We analyze the candidates and their views. We print polls reflecting the public’s views. Afterward we discuss the vote — who won, who lost and why.

During a democratic election, we journalists usually cover certain bases. We analyze the candidates and their views. We print polls reflecting the public's views. Afterward we discuss the vote — who won, who lost and why.

“We are not pretending that the human rights situation in Syria is perfect. ... We are aware that there is a regression in the quality of services usually provided by the government to the population by the regions facing violence.”

"We are not pretending that the human rights situation in Syria is perfect.
. . . We are aware that there is a regression in the quality of services usually provided by the government to the population by the regions facing violence."

Icouldn’t decide whether to laugh or to cry when I heard that the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had found a solution to the Syrian crisis. Speaking in Damascus on Tuesday, Lavrov declared that everything was fine: President Bashar al-Assad was “completely committed to the task of stopping violence regardless of where it may come from.” Russia’s foreign ministry backed up this statement by calling for “the swiftest stabilization of the situation in Syria on the basis of the swiftest...

I couldn't decide whether to laugh or to cry when I heard that the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had found a solution to the Syrian crisis. Speaking in Damascus on Tuesday, Lavrov declared that everything was fine: President Bashar al-Assad was "completely committed to the task of stopping violence regardless of where it may come from." Russia's foreign ministry backed up this statement by calling for "the swiftest stabilization of the situation in Syria on the basis of the...