Europe News

“This very special ephemeral installation that we are inviting you to be part of is devised to capture and combine the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures”

Reuters Sunday, May 11, 2008; 9:51 AM VIENNA - Hundreds of Austrians stripped naked on Sunday for photographer Spencer Tunick at the stadium that will host the Euro 2008 soccer final. via The Washington Post

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“The risk of the company falling into the hands of competitors in the tourist trade has been averted.”

Italy is seeking solutions for Alitalia that would keep it both Italian and privately owned, the government said Saturday, responding to EU warnings against renationalising the ailing air carrier. via Raw Story

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“The very idea of freedom exists here and it is developing”

A gloomy Vladimir Putin wears a Czarist crown, clutching a bag full of dollars and a miniature television tower.

Filipp Pishchik says this and similar cartoons, depicting the former president as a corrupt leader who stifles free speech, got him in trouble with authorities and forced him to leave Moscow last year for neighboring Ukraine.

'Ukraine is just great,' said the 37-year-old designer and architect. 'Here there is hope.'

Since the 2004 Orange Revolution ushered in a vigorous, sometimes chaotic democracy, Ukraine has become an island of freedom and tolerance in an ex-Soviet bloc still dominated by authoritarian regimes, and journalists, political activists, artists, and business professionals have flocked here. Read more

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“He has given a statement that leads us to believe that he really believed this was possible. But we are of course having a hard time understanding how someone could actually believe such a tall tale”

A Vietnamese man in Norway lost around 35,000 dollars after he was led to believe that mixing the cash with a special liquid would double its value, Norwegian media reported Saturday. via The Tocqueville Connection

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“We need to fight attempts to break up Britain from nationalists on one hand, and the dangers of attempting to create a separate English parliament on the other.”

Gordon Brown has vowed to do "whatever is necessary" to preserve the United Kingdom in the wake of a bruising battle over a referendum on Scottish independence. via Telegraph.co.uk

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“Serbia can no longer project power beyond its own borders like it did in the 1990s. I don't know what we're afraid of. Times have changed.”

Serbia is haunted anew by the ghost of Slobodan Milosevic.

Eight years after the late Serbian strongman was toppled in a popular revolt, and a little more than two years after his death while on U.N. trial for genocide and crimes against humanity, his former loyalists have never been closer to regaining power.

On the eve of Sunday's parliamentary elections, experts warned that nationalists who have tapped into widespread outrage over Kosovo's independence may ride an unprecedented wave of anti-Western sentiment to victory. Read more

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“We believe our asset management business did very well, given the extremely difficult market environment”

FRANKFURT, Germany : German insurer Allianz SE said Friday first-quarter net profit fell 65 percent due to difficult market conditions as it wrote down 845 million related to the U.S. subprime crisis. via International Herald Tribune

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“But we have a system in place that makes broad-based misdeeds on the past scale impossible in the future.”

German public prosecutors said on Friday they had called off a criminal inquiry against a former chief executive of Siemens, the electrical giant struggling to shake off a history of winning contracts by ... via Deutsche Welle

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“We didn't ask those who died here what region (of Canada) they were from. We knew what country they were from. We didn't even ask them what language they spoke. Those buried here, even if they didn't speak our language, saved us and helped us.”

- Nicolas Sarkozy's stirring declaration of love for Canada this week surprised Quebec separatists who saw it as an abrupt about-face from France's longtime neutrality on the issue of Canadian unity.

But sources in the Canadian government say the French president made it abundantly clear where he stood in his first meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper a year ago.

That encounter at the Elysee Palace made news only for the images it produced of the two leaders strolling the streets of Paris afterward and shaking hands with passersby on their way to lunch. Read more

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Serbia's government has approved a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the European Union, which is seen as a key step towards membership of the bloc. via Deutsche Welle

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