The city of Bergen’s stately Statsraad Lehmkuhl, the world’s largest three-masted cutter, at anchor by the reneissance Rosenkrantz Tower. This photo not by me.

The foreign press keeps writing nice things about my medieval hometown, Bergen on Norway’s west coast, and the tourists are milling around downtown in the glorious weather. So I decided to pick up a camera and pretend to be one myself. The results, with an emphasis on wooden houses and funny, eclectic architecture, are seen below (please click to enlarge).

Annotations for some of the photos to follow:

The second picture is a view of the 12th century St. Mary’s church. Pictures #4, 5, and 7 feature the old Hanseatic wharf, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Some of the warehouses date back to the 14th century. The sixth photo is from the open-air fish market nearby.

The fifth picture from the bottom features Mon Plaisir, a temple pavillion from the 1830s that belonged to a mountainside mansion.

The rails on the last photo are those of the famous funicular climbing 850 meters from downtown to Mt. Fløyen at 15-26 degrees incline.

Welcome to Bergen — if not in the flesh, then in the spirit!

Crossposted from European Tribune.

By a standard social science definition, ‘civil war’ refers to hostilities between organized groups within a country, whereby at least one side tries to overtake or sway the government, and causing at least 1,000 dead with at least 100 on each side. Now consider Iraq. June brought this merry news:

But that was just part of the total. And things have since deteriorated badly, says the UN:

In the US President’s model democracy, June alone claimed more lives than 9/11. I’m afraid this is it. Congratulations, pro-war scum.