by moscerina

Photo credit: "Testaccio blues" by _mirko_ (無)

When it rains, Rome is usually the last place anyone wants to be. You can’t eat outside, unless you don’t mind getting quasi-soaked. The buses, trams and taxis seems to be in limited edition. The Vatican Museums are overrun and the Forum has a mud river flowing through it. That doesn’t mean there is nothing to do in Rome. It just means you have to be clever and get out of the historical center.

And right now, this means visiting Testaccio, the latest “really, truly Roman” neighborhood to be gentrified.

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by tim anderson

If there is one thing that can be said about the current government in Denmark, it's that they are becoming rather predictable.

Needing the proudly xenophobic/racist Dansk Folkeparti to prop up their minority/coalition government, the government has developed a nasty little habit of throwing their support behind various proposals propagating the idea of 'Danishness' (thereby helping to ward off perceived threats to whatever it is that this so-called 'Danishness' is...).

The Dansk Folkeparti loves squeezing out these sorts of legislative turds from the bowels of their parliamentary caucus, as they are the self-proclaimed protectors of the Danish society and cultural identity in parliament. And the government knows how to appease the Dansk Folkeparti.

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by tim anderson

News reporters in Copenhagen, and in particular TV2 News – Denmark’s 24-hour news channel - recently had what was probably their biggest news week for several years.

It all began with a police raid of the Ungdomhus (‘The Youth House’) in Nørrebro in Copenhagen on March 1, which succeeded in clearing out the occupants of the building. The Ungdomshus had been the subject of much controversy over the previous months (and years) thanks to the steadfast refusal of those using the building to voluntarily vacate the premises.

You see, it had been sold by the local government some years before and had been used by a large number of young people for many many years (since 1982, in fact) to stage regular events and parties. The controversy basically ended with the demolition of the building 5 days later.

The aftermath of the police clear-out of Ungdomshus carried on throughout the weekend (March 1-4) - some 400-600 were arrested and plenty of demonstrations in support of the building ensued.

It was a tale of two protests, you could say.

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by sabine behrman

Princess Alexandra, Queen Margrethe's ex-daughter-in-law, has decided to marry her boyfriend on March3, thus leaving the royal family for good and be reduced to a lowly Countess of Frederiksborg. She'll lose the last of her privileges, but not her annual alimony of appr. € 250.000.

However, she will have to pay about 73 % taxes. So she'll probably need a job.

The media and all their royal specialists are having a fieldday.

Some are probably terribly disappointed that the wedding is to take place without them.

And all of this almost drowned the news that Danmarks Radio needs yet another one hundred million Euro to pay for their new digs...

Photos: (above) Princess Alexandra at Odense Zoo
(below) Princess Alexandra with new beau Martin (on her left) and ex-husband Joachim (on her right). 

Photo credits: Flukedk & l&coolj 

by ben curtis 

While they are busy building enough new flats around Madrid to house the remaining few young professionals that still haven’t fled to the city from the economically depressed provinces, there are a remarkable number of empty flats here in the centre of the city. Half the shutters in the 6 floor building opposite ours are permanently down - a sure sign of an empty home - and no-one has lived next to, or below us, for as long as we have been here. There are a vast number of unoccupied flats in the centre of Madrid, a problem that is reflected in large cities all over Spain.

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by jared bibler

I met with NPR's Eric Weiner again last week after work, for a follow-up interview on happiness in the Land. He's not doing a radio bit on this, but he is coming out with a book on the happiest countries (and he wants you to buy it!).

The second conversation I had with him was much better as he seemed to have settled in to the laid-back ways of Reykjavík after some more days here. (If you missed it, take a look back at our first conversation.)

The Friday-after-work meeting was in sharp contrast to one I had the night before with an instructor I had helped bring in to teach an investment-related class here. Like many Americans I meet here (mostly hot-tub tourists) he asked why I liked it here

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by tim anderson

I’ve been running my own blog, The Copenhagen Report, for the past two years now, but as this is my first article for Shortcut, I'll back up and give a short introduction to the city I now call home.

Copenhagen is where the rest of Europe often aspires to be and imagines itself to be – at least in social terms. But, if you ask me, nowhere else in Europe comes close.

The term I would use to describe life in Copenhagen is ‘balance’.

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by almendro

Thanksgiving has now past, and you know what that means.

We’ve written before about el caganer - the Catalan crapper who shows up in nativity scenes this time of year. The caganer is a mischievous reminder that, despite the high serenity of the Virgin Birth, nature has its way.

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by sam baron

As a part of the Fabrica exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fabrica Design Department created a temporary  store that will only last for five months. The store is a project exploring the process of creating a retail space using materials and local resources. 

Where is all this taking place? Artés 135, rue Saint Martin, 75003 Paris. And when? 6 October - 13 November 2006

The concept behind the store is this: Five designers had five days to make the space and 50 products to display. Each designer was involved in sharing their personal and cultural views on the retail experience. Concept, resourcing, organization, and execution was a collective effort.

Inside the store you'll find a shelving sculpture made out of metro shelving in the gallery space, a stock room of yellow customised products, a colors magazine reading room, as well as many Fabrica Features objects made specifically for the store.

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by sabine behrmann
 
What do you give to someone who has been everywhere, tried everything, and is a bit blasé about new experiences because there isn't really anything new under the sun?

Try a bottle of Danish red wine. It will at least raise an eyebrow or two. And provoke a certain astonishment. Wineries in Denmark? Who has heard of such a thing?

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More than 35 million people on the planet are trying to escape war, violence or repression.

The exhibition "Life on the Run" shows in 10 tents what daily life in refugee camps looks like and how "Ärzte ohne Grenzen" (Médecins Sans Frontières) helps.

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Temperatures in Madrid have dropped in the past few days, which means I've probably made my last gazpacho of the season.

In truth, it took me a long time to learn to love gazpacho. Not only because, well into my twenties, I refused to eat tomatoes (until the fateful day when I passed a market in Caligari, Sardinia--how well I remember it!--and the red globes looked too delicious to pass up). But mostly because, even after I had learned to love the tomato, I only tried gazpacho in the US, where it tends suffer from a serious texture problem.

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by schlockholm - the stockholm blog 

Swedish scientists are now saying that oral sex can give you cancer. Well, giving oral sex to be specific.

The same virus that causes cancer of the uterus is thought to be linked to tonsillary cancer, say boffins at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute (KI), hastily adding that changed sexual habits and more oral sex are also linked problem.

During the past 30 years the number of tonsil cancer cases has tripled in Stockholm. In the same period the amount of tumors infected with Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) has gone up from 23 percent in the 70s to 68 percent in recent years.

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by the paris blog 

Bonjour Messieurs Dames!

It’s not hard to say. Sometime I say it to myself just for the heck of it. But it was so hard to get into the habit, when I first moved here, of singing it out every time I entered a bakery or a fruit shop. Chris at ParisLogue explains how crucial it is to utter the french version of “‘Sup?”:

Talk to a Parisian over dinner and in one breath he will adamantly oppose Le Pen and the anti-immigration policies of the National Front and in the second breath he will complain about the Asian and Arab immigrants failure to s’integrer into French life.

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by jared bibler 

The fall is definitely here, with clear sunny skies and a bit of a chill in the air. The clouds are high and have a certain sidelit pink-yellow light in the evenings. And last night the first windstorm came pounding on my windows, slamming the bedroom window shut with some authority as I was drifting off to sleep. The whistling wind continued all through the night and this morning there were whitecaps on the bay and the water was greenish and churned.

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