Monday morning roundup

Change may or may not be coming to Egypt. How change came and went in Ukraine. The latter article actually offers an insightful look at Eastern European identity politics, for those interested in that sort of thing. It also reminded me of an incident a few years ago, when the Y was my gym, and I found myself in the sauna with a woman who, like me, was annoyed at the head-up-the-ass parenting in the place (which was particularly visible in the sauna, where parents would let their kids jump up and down on the benches; they'd even open the door, even though others were in there, because the kids complained it was 'too hot.' But I digress). She made some sort of comment like, 'I'm European! We do saunas right.' Fair enough. I know that--a good friend of mine is Swedish, and her family, whom I visited years ago, has a sauna in their backyard. But this woman clearly wasn't Scandinavian. I detected an Eastern European accent, and, besides, you won't find anyone from France or Germany, or Switzerland (or pretty much anywhere in Western or Central Europe) calling themselves 'European,' at least not as an initial statement of identity. I asked her where she was from; she answered 'Ukraine,' and then repeated that she was European. Anyway, that article touches on Ukraine's Europe-or-Russia identity crisis.

Do we not have more seriously persecuted people to whom to grant asylum? I've read the Refugee Convention; I'm pretty sure it doesn't cover persecution on the basis of a preference for home schooling.

There is something very, very wrong about this incident, and it's not that the girl got off without charges.

Empathy and health care reform.

Working mothers don't have it easy in South Korea, which, among other things, has the largest gender wage gap in the world.

Learning Russian is hot again.

I alluded to resistance to antibiotics, as exacerbated by factory farming, the other day. Here's another biproduct of unsustainable agriculture, and it's choking the Chesapeake Bay.