My Substack where I go into why Kosovo Serbs are really facing the end - on Monday. I include comments from the EU and US as well as a policy brief I did on the issues. email.mg-d1.substack.com/c/eJxkksGunD...
USAID public servants lost our careers, pensions, and healthcare. Some lost their homes. Some lost their children’s tuition. Some colleagues died by suicide. Now we learn our Social Security numbers were stolen and exposed too.
♥️🏴 Rhys Carré. But have you all noticed that once Taine Plumtree disappeared everything got better?
Me briefly on the EU Rapporteur’s draft report on Kosovo.
How Lihue 1 in France is advertising the weekend match ups as Le Crunch weekend (everyone going for the English).
Not saying the French are mad on rugby, but they’ve apparently sold 20,000 tickets in Bordeaux on Saturday for ‘Crunch Creator’: some dreadful sounding retired players + influencers game with a real whiff of the Baller League about the rules
In Kosovo there is an established men’s team in 15s & 7s & even an U16 boys team. There is nothing for women or girls. They simply don’t care.
That only applies to World Rugby members. Often smaller countries are only members of their confederation & with Rugby Afrique this applies to their equivalent of the champions cup. Ex: no one is forcing KS to have women’s sides & Rugby Europe even let them host a regional 7s tournament -men only.
Btw I wonder how much it helped that Rugby Afrique leaned into the women’s game by making it compulsory to have a women’s side for every team going to their continental championships
They’re going to take over the women’s game.
Where The Telegraph discover the spirit of Sixmas archive.ph/tTQXb
💯 Despite all of this I wasn’t prepared for Shirley Henderson’s performance. Or how extraordinary the end was. Ranks up there with what Panahi did at the of It was just an accident.
If you haven’t seen I Swear do yourself a favor. I rarely get that emotional about a film but it’s a gorgeous film.
4-6, 7-6(5), 6-3: Siniakova upsets defending champ Andreeva. Wow. I talked to her about nearly leaving Top 100 to get back to Top 40, hoping for Top 20. She praised new mindset & work on FH. « I changed a few points of view. I’m trying to enjoy it more…» tennissweetspot.substack.com/p/the-sincar...
We go deep on the weekend, and what a weekend it was.
w @joshgardner.bsky.social
Updates on Croatia and Kosovo from me. Kosovo on pause as the Constitutional Court orders everyone to their corners
It’s Monday, I’m tried, and Indian Wells is only in R3. 🫠
I updated the post with the archive link (1999-2012; rest coming later) which they sent after I wrote about it on the other site. I don’t think the spot understands why having a history of “just media links translated into English “ are important for understanding Kosovo’s history 🤷🏽♀️
that it would end. And the response from UNMIK I got was a bit dismissive.
and what was the real reason behind closing it - they claim it’s financial but it was a one person job for years. It is incredibly sad bc it helped develop minority media also many media don’t exist or exist the way they did 25 years ago. So you can imagine the loss. There was also no warning..
On my Substack: they finally threw me out of Women’s Day. But more importantly UNMIK shutting down the Media Observer that covered Alb&Serb lang & Intl media twice daily. It ran for over 25 years & forms an incredible archive of postwar Kosovo. I tried to find out what would happen to the archive..
With Europe rapidly rearming in response to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, countries in the Western Balkans are also gaining access to new weaponry – @bronwynjones.bsky.social reports
www.euractiv.com/news/eu-rear...
Oh, good. "this is now starting to look like a potential combination of the 1973 post-Yom Kippur War oil shock, the 2022 Russia-Ukraine War commodity shock, and the 2020-21 Covid supply chain shock."
Also me twice (!) in the newsletter. This time on Croatia new draft & Kosovo political crisis update
A couple things didn’t make the cut but Serbia is also part of the NATO Partnership for Peace program and will have joint exercises w/NATO in May in Serbia. So when ppl say ah Serbia Russia ally it really isn’t so simple. Remember NATO also has KFOR in Kosovo protecting against-Serbia
My latest from @euractiv.com on the Balkans arms race
www.thetimes.com/world/middle... An amazing piece on Paul Bremer’s heretofore ca he if emails about what really happened in Iraq
There's a big movement on X, and a smaller one here, claiming that Israel is censoring the widespread death and destruction caused by Iran's missiles. And it's totally false. This video below, for example, is from 1 March, a week ago. It was on all the news channels.
Starting to see Nordic countries detaining and boarding more shadow fleet ships. There has been a hard to understand hesitancy to do this www.dn.se/direkt/2026-...
Btw Royal Wooton Bassett contributed a lot to the decision to stop showing coffins: www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/feb/...
