30-05-2010, 02:52 PM
I can't tell from the grainy black-and-white photo if she's cute or not, oh well! She's a good writer, at least!
Isn't Sigurdur Einarsson the subject of Iceland's extradition request to the UK, and now subject to an interpol warrant, or is that another one?
Before we get too happy about Iceland's great environmental activity, let's remember the recent guidelines issued for keeping whale-watching tourists away from the kill zones!
Also, their geothermal operation, or at least one of them, a large one, was recently acquired by a foreign company that plans to explore in a very sensitive semi-pristine patch of an Icelandic geo/biopreserve.
On the political front it seems the new Best Party, started by a local comedian and promising the public corruption (a joke?), seems to have made big gains in the elections over recent days, although the conservatives looked like the real winners in my scanning of headlines.
Further items:
Iceland recently named the safest country in the world (this appeared while the volcano was going off)
Volcano winding down while bigger volcano Ketla shows seismic activity
Unemployment down, signs of economic recovery appearing
Iceland, Faroes and Greenland considering how to celebrate West Nordic organization with special day of the year
Foreigners allowed to vote in local municipal elections (Polish are largest minority followed by Lithuanians; same type story from Greenland about a Canadian non-Danish non-Greenlandic speaker regretting he wasn't allowed to vote in territory-wide elections last year, not sure of full story there)
The bill to make gay and hetero marriage legally equal will probably pass with little or no dissent in the Althingi, I think only one person voted against civil marriages for same-sex marriages the first time. One of the former PMs was openly lesbian.
One of the weirder stories of recent times from the Icelandic press was the exhumation of political asylum seeker and former chess world champion Gary Fischer. He ran into trouble after writing some political and allegedly anti-Semitic stuff while hiding out in Japan. He also allegedly wrote on American foreign policy. His passport was seized at some point for being out of date, I think when he was going back and forth to the Philippines to renew the Japanese visa. America wanted to extradite him for something but Iceland stepped in and offered asylum.
When he died various heirs and pretenders appeared, but apparently not initially, not until some assets of some sort were discovered. There was a question about paternity and wedlock and Icelandic authorities decided to exhume the corpse to perform DNA tests. Everything about the Gary Fischer story is odd. Gary Kasparov is also an odd story, going from chess champion to politician.
Isn't Sigurdur Einarsson the subject of Iceland's extradition request to the UK, and now subject to an interpol warrant, or is that another one?
Before we get too happy about Iceland's great environmental activity, let's remember the recent guidelines issued for keeping whale-watching tourists away from the kill zones!
Also, their geothermal operation, or at least one of them, a large one, was recently acquired by a foreign company that plans to explore in a very sensitive semi-pristine patch of an Icelandic geo/biopreserve.
On the political front it seems the new Best Party, started by a local comedian and promising the public corruption (a joke?), seems to have made big gains in the elections over recent days, although the conservatives looked like the real winners in my scanning of headlines.
Further items:
Iceland recently named the safest country in the world (this appeared while the volcano was going off)
Volcano winding down while bigger volcano Ketla shows seismic activity
Unemployment down, signs of economic recovery appearing
Iceland, Faroes and Greenland considering how to celebrate West Nordic organization with special day of the year
Foreigners allowed to vote in local municipal elections (Polish are largest minority followed by Lithuanians; same type story from Greenland about a Canadian non-Danish non-Greenlandic speaker regretting he wasn't allowed to vote in territory-wide elections last year, not sure of full story there)
The bill to make gay and hetero marriage legally equal will probably pass with little or no dissent in the Althingi, I think only one person voted against civil marriages for same-sex marriages the first time. One of the former PMs was openly lesbian.
One of the weirder stories of recent times from the Icelandic press was the exhumation of political asylum seeker and former chess world champion Gary Fischer. He ran into trouble after writing some political and allegedly anti-Semitic stuff while hiding out in Japan. He also allegedly wrote on American foreign policy. His passport was seized at some point for being out of date, I think when he was going back and forth to the Philippines to renew the Japanese visa. America wanted to extradite him for something but Iceland stepped in and offered asylum.
When he died various heirs and pretenders appeared, but apparently not initially, not until some assets of some sort were discovered. There was a question about paternity and wedlock and Icelandic authorities decided to exhume the corpse to perform DNA tests. Everything about the Gary Fischer story is odd. Gary Kasparov is also an odd story, going from chess champion to politician.