Butterflies are free you know! A video from BoyThreeOne.

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Darijo Srna and Ivica Olić each scored for the Croats to lead them past the Mannschaft. The long awaited match lived up to its billing with two of Europe’s powerhouses going to toe to toe and up and down the length of the pitch. Lukas Podolski, Germany’s hero against Poland, scored late to bring Germany within one. However, German chances were dimmed when Bastian Schweinsteiger was red carded and sent off. Germany next faces co-host Austria. The Croats can look forward to the Round of 8 having locked up the top position in Group B. That also absolves the Croats from hooking up against the Portuguese, perhaps the most dominant squad so far.

In the second match, a late penalty gave Austria a tie against Poland 1-1 in Vienna. Along with Germany, either of these two teams can still secure a pass to the next round with a second place finish in Group B. Of course, that also means a date with Portugal in the next round.

Today’s Matches
The Group of Death returns to action tomorrow in Switzerland. For Italy, which was stunned by the Netherlands 0-3, tomorrow’s game against Romania is a must-win. In the other game, France takes on Holland. The Dutch lead Group C with three points, France and Romania have one point and Italy trails with nil.

For more on the matches and the tournment, please visit Euro2008.

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Bolsheviks (were a minority faction of the Russian Communist Party versus the Mensheviks or “the Majority”) were an organization of professional revolutionaries under a strict internal hierarchy governed by the principle of democratic centralism and quasi-military discipline, who considered themselves as a vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism. We can safely say that Obamaism can be equated with Bolshevism, this is nothing less than a coup led by a new caudillo, Barack Obama. For someone who professes to want to run a campaign from the bottom-up, this is the inverse. It’s centralized control from the top down.

Via Ben Smith at Politico;

In a major shakeup at the Democratic National Committee — and a departure from tradition — large parts of the committee’s operations are relocating to Chicago to be fully integrated with the Obama campaign.

The DNC’s political department, housed in Washington, D.C., will be dramatically rebuilt, with staffers offered a choice of moving to Chicago, joining state operations, or staying in Washington, DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney said.

But the power will clearly be shifting to a centralized Chicago hub.

The DNC’s key role in coordinating political operations with state parties is expected to largely be taken over and overseen by Obama’s senior staff in Chicago, state party officials said.

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Lawyer, teacher, philanthropist, and author Barack Obama doesn’t need another career. But he’s entering politics to get back to his true passion–community organization.

To get a sense of who Obama really is I went back looking for articles about the very junior Senator from Illinois and read them. This first article is from the Chicago Reader published December 1995. The title is What Makes Obama Run? Ironic how we have yet to answer that question 12 years plus hence. There are few money quotes but it is largely a positive piece, call it fluff if you want, but it does provide some insight into the engima that is Obama.

When Barack Obama returned to Chicago in 1991 after three brilliant years at Harvard Law School, he didn’t like what he saw. The former community activist, then 30, had come fresh from a term as president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, a position he was the first African-American to hold. Now he was ready to continue his battle to organize Chicago’s black neighborhoods. But the state of the city muted his exuberance.

“Upon my return to Chicago,” he would write in the epilogue to his recently published memoir, Dreams From My Father, “I would find the signs of decay accelerated throughout the South Side–the neighborhoods shabbier, the children edgier and less restrained, more middle-class families heading out to the suburbs, the jails bursting with glowering youth, my brothers without prospects. All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we’ve done to make so many children’s hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass–what values we must live by. Instead I see us doing what we’ve always done–pretending that these children are somehow not our own.”

Today, after three years of law practice and civic activism, Obama has decided to dive into electoral politics. He is running for the Illinois Senate, he says, because he wants to help create jobs and a decent future for those embittered youth. But when he met with some veteran politicians to tell them of his plans, the only jobs he says they wanted to talk about were theirs and his. Obama got all sorts of advice. Some of it perplexed him; most of it annoyed him. One African-American elected official suggested that Obama change his name, which he’d inherited from his late Kenyan father. Another told him to put a picture of his light-bronze, boyish face on all his campaign materials, “so people don’t see your name and think you’re some big dark guy.”

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It’s called global climatic change. The model calls for more severe weather more frequently so that a “flood of the century” now happens every fifteen years. My condolences to the Wisconsin family that saw their home, not just flooded, but washed away. Not something you are bound to forget.

I witnessed one flood as a boy in my native Colombia and it was impactful. We lived a block from the Rio Cali in Cali, Colombia. Normally, one could skip across the rocks to cross it and not even get your feet wet. That one day, I saw jeeps tossed like bananas, boulders being swept downriver, trees lifted and placed wherever the water wanted to take them. I have never forgotten the spectacle. Perhaps worse were the after-effects, at least for me as a boy of 8, rats and snakes invaded our home which only saw our garage flooded. I’ll never forget my grandmother’s screams when she found a boa constrictor wrapped around the Sacred Heart of Jesus in our family chapel. The frogs, however, were beyond cool. The snakes not so much.

The flood I witnessed in 1969 was a natural event. The floods in the mid-west are not. They are caused by our lifestyle. It’s time to take serious measures on climate change and that means getting Americans out of their cars, five days a week. We need massive transportation infrastructure so that most Americans can commute to work by light rail. The time for this was twenty years ago. When will Congress act?

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University of Arizona Professor Lane Kenworthy (and one of my favourite bloggers on economics and sociology) takes his family on a road trip and explores how the annual American ritual of the family cross-country drive has changed over the past 30 years. His post is on his blog: Measuring Living Standards by the Family Road Trip. It is an interesting article on how living standards have changed over this period.

Thankfully, I was largely spared spared this ritual growing up. My parents separated when I was ten and my family Summer vacations, generally in Europe, with my mother and sister were more train rides than any thing else and my mother is rather frugal. Lots of beds and breakfasts or pensiones, few hotels and she was nothing but a drill sargent on our vacations. “We’re sleeping in dollars” was her constant refrain so we were up at 7AM to start our touring. Of course, now as an adult, I know I received an amazing cultural education and for that I am very grateful to my mother.

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Swiss Heartbreaker
In a driving rain in Basel, Switzerland fell to Turkey 1-2 on a regulation time goal in the 92nd minute making the co-host Swiss the first team to exit though they still have one match left against Portugal. The serious injury suffered by captain Alexander Frei was perhaps the harbinger of doom as Köbi Kuhn’s co-hosts lost, arguably unluckily, to the Czech Republic in Saturday’s Group A curtain-raiser. But at least fans of the Nati held on to hope going into Wednesday’s match against another point-less team, Turkey. Coming out of it, though, they had nothing but a lost dream and a guaranteed wooden spoon in the group. Arda Turan’s 92nd-minute knife through the heart summed up the Swiss campaign – deflecting, decisively, off the heels of defender Patrick Müller and over goalkeeper Diego Benaglio. A slice of awful luck.

Portuguese Joy & Portuguese Hunks
Meanwhile Portugal used its speed on the counter-attack to pounce on the Czech Republic 3-1. Portugal now moves on to the next round. The Czechs now play Turkey for the second spot from Group A. Portugal also won twice today. Its handsome striker who plays for Manchester United, Christian Ronaldo was voted Euro Hunk 2008. More on that below.

Christian Ronaldo Named Euro Hunk 2008
Think of it as the Mr. Congeniality Prize and the 23-year old Portuguese striker is very congenial by all appearances. The prize is voted on by the fans and I’m a fan. Christian e muito bem. Belo, belo, belo.

Today’s Matches
Poland takes on co-host Austria in Vienna. Both sides lost their first match and look to win to keep their hopes of advancing intact. The second match pits Croatia versus Germany, perhaps the most anticipated match-up of the opening round as both nations are among the favourites to win the tourney.

For more on the matches and the tournment, please visit Euro2008.

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The Thursday, June, 12th, 2008 edition of events and interesting reads that are making news from around the world.

Secret al-Qaida report found on London train–Official Suspended
Highly classified intelligence documents relating to two of the most sensitive issues involving Britain’s security interests - al-Qaida in Pakistan and the situation in Iraq - were found on a train near London. A Whitehall official, unnamed, has been suspended. The Daily Mail has the story.

The New Scramble for Africa
Last year, by one estimate, the government of Mozambique received bids from foreign investors to buy a remarkable 110,000 square kilometres of land, more than an eighth of the entire country. More than a century after the last “scramble for Africa”, when European imperial powers fought to colonise the continent, the global boom in biofuels is causing a stampede into one of the world’s biggest areas of uncultivated terrain. The Financial Times reports on how the mad dash for bio-fuels is affecting Mozambique and Tanzania.

Japanese PM Fukuda Survives Censure Motion
On Wednesday, the opposition-controlled upper house adopted the first - non-binding - censure against a prime minister since World War II. However, Japan’s lower house has backed a confidence motion in Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, a day after the upper house passed a censure against him. The ruling coalition used its majority in the more powerful lower house to support its beleaguered leader. The BBC. In separate news, Japan will start a trial system for carbon emissions trade in the autumn, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said Monday, unveiling a new climate change policy that set a goal for cutting greenhouse gas emissions for 2050 - but not for 2020, as some environmental advocates had been proposing. Japan, the world’s fifth-largest emitter, estimates that it can cut greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent by 2020 from current levels. This story from the International Herald Tribune. And finally to put all Japan news in one place, ABC Australia reports that a Japanese business has bought the company that holds the development rights for the Bald Hills wind farm project in South Gippsland in South Australia.

Germany To Implement Test for New Citizens
Anyone who wants to become a German citizen will have to pass a citizenship test from September, with the questions to test applicants’ knowledge of the country’s history, politics and society. Germany’s Der Spiegel has the details. Take The Quiz se if you have what it takes to become German. I got six of seven right but my father is German.

A Boom in Romania
Romania has been growing at a rate of around 6% per year nonstop since 1999. So — on paper at least — its economy has nearly doubled in size since then, not bad for a decade. And you can see it. Bucharest bustles with traffic and new construction. People on the streets are visibly dressed better than just a few years ago. A large and growing middle class is serviced by European hypermarkets and superstores, including several Carrefours and an Ikea. More from Fistful of Euros, those lucky souls.

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