Regular Trans-Int readers will undoubtedly remember Susanne Osthoff: the burqa-wearing German archaeologist who was allegedly kidnapped in Iraq last December and then released following payment of a reported $5 million ransom by the German government. This photo,

which was published earlier this month in the German weekly Stern, shows two German intelligence agents with… the principal suspect in the Osthoff kidnapping. It was reportedly taken just one day before Osthoff went missing. For more on the circumstances and implications -- as well as details of Osthoff's latest bizarre appearance on German television -- see my new article on World Politics Watch here.

Another out-of-area translation that might be of interest. Late last year, Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche and his Afghan colleague Sami Yousafzai were kidnapped and then released by Taliban forces. Their lengthy report not only makes for gripping reading, it also provides an interesting -- and troubling -- overview of the current balance of forces in Afghanistan.

The NATO troops and the Taliban share "the same fate", according to Gehriger and Yousafzai: "they are both too strong to lose, but too weak to win." But the authors ominously cite the Taliban official Mullah Sabir, who:

believes that time is on his side: "The West has the better weapons, but we can hold our breath longer." He is convinced that the Taliban's terror will grind down the West. At some point, the pressure will be too much for people in the West: then the unholy invaders will withdraw. "That day," Mullah Sabir says, "will be the day of our triumph."

For Gehriger's and Yousafzai's whole report, "Kidnapped by the Taliban" -- translated by myself -- see here on World Politics Watch.

The German Social Democratic Party's Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) published a public opinion study late last year that came to the conclusion that "right-wing extremism" -- a German euphemism for neo-Nazi sentiment -- is more wide-spread in western Germany than in the eastern German provinces that formerly constituted the GDR. In light of the electoral success of the extremist NPD in the East and the highly visible presence of a violent neo-Nazi youth "scene", the result is rather surprising. It is perhaps worth mentioning in this connection that the German Social Democrats are highly dependent upon electoral support from the East for their success on the national level.

The following from an article on French homelessness in today's NYTimes by the Times's man in Paris, Craig S. Smith. 

Given France’s well-financed social services, the country’s homeless problem is relatively mild — the national statistics bureau estimated the number of people living without a fixed address on any one night at 86,000 for all of France in 2004, about equal to the number of homeless in Los Angeles alone. But even that number is disturbing for the socially active segment of France’s population.

This reassuringly low official French homelessness figure of 86,000 is widely-cited in the docile French media and it is sometimes even dated, as in the NYTimes article, to 2004. In fact, however, it dates from a study conducted by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies [INSEE] in 2001, i.e. well before the currently ongoing explosion in French homelessness became painfully obvious to anyone walking down a Parisian street (except, evidently, Craig S. Smith). 

Paris, Rue de Rivoli, Fall 2004

 
 
Moreover, even when it was first made public in 2002, the 86,000 INSEE figure was criticized for underestimating the real extent of homelessness in France. Anne-Laure Pham, writing in a recent issue of the French weekly L'Express, notes that French charitable associations -- already at the time -- put the real figure "between 100,000 and 800,000."

 
Whatever the actual figure is today -- and, despite reports of a new INSEE headcount in early 2006, neither the French government, nor French academics seem in any great hurry to clarify the matter -- it is surely some multiple of the wildly unrealistic 86,000 figure.

 
For more on the French homeless crisis -- and Craig S. Smith's remarkable contributions to obscuring its severity -- see my July 2006 article on TCS Daily "France's New Poverty".

This post is, I am afraid, long overdue. As regular Trans-Int readers will already have inferred, the original ambitious plans for the "new" Trans-Int launched in Fall 2005 have had at least to be "postponed", viz. to some indefinite later date. This is due to a number of factors: technical difficulties at launch and subsequently not being the least important among them. 

Nonetheless, the original "guiding idea" of Trans-Int has largely confirmed its promise. Perhaps the best gauge of this is the extent to which "established" media have seen fit to draw upon material first published or brought into English here.