On 12 September, Norway elects a new Storting (Parliament). Kristin Halvorsen, the president of the Socialist Left Party SV began her electoral campaign last week with a five-day visit to India and Pakistan.

Immigrants make up 3.6% of the Norwegian electorate in the general elections. In Oslo, however, this figure is 12%. For the municipal elections, where everybody who has lived in Norway for three years is entitled to vote, the Oslo figure is 18%. A large part of the Norwegian immigrant population is of Pakistani origin. Most of the Norwegian Pakistanis come from the region of Kharian, a Punjabi town that is sometimes referred to locally as “Little Norway”  because so many families have relatives in Norway. Halvorsen hopes that campaigning in Kharian during the holiday season will help her win votes in Norway next month.

Of all religious groups Baptists were among the most fiercely persecuted in the Soviet Union. They were not just Christians but they also distrusted the state, preaching an institutional secession from state-run institutions. Many Baptists belonged to the German-speaking minority in Southern Russia and Kazakhstan. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they emigrated to Germany, the land where their forefathers had originally come from. Today, these Baptist immigrants from Russia, as well as the Low-German Mennonites, are being prosecuted in Germany because they are unhappy with what their children are learning in the German public schools, which they consider too secular. Children are not allowed to opt out of classes or school activities and homeschooling is illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938.

As I traipse into the European Parliament press shop I am struck by the breadth and range of the publications on display. The magazine that caught my eye today is a new lifestyle magazine, one that appeals the very core of my being,

Allergy - the essential lifestyle guide for people with allergies

King Fahd (b. 1923), Saudi Arabia’s ruler since 1982, died early this morning. “He had a reputation as a playboy in his youth, with allegations of womanising, drinking and gambling to excess,” the BBC writes in an obituary.

 

Belgium’s King Albert II has offered his condolences. Albert and Fahd crossed each other’s paths when they were both crown princes, but the Belgian will probably not like to be reminded of it. The new Saudi king, Abdullah, Fahd’s halfbrother, is also a friend of Albert’s, from the same period in Albert’s womanising past.

Wim Duisenberg, the 70-year old Dutch founding chairman of the European Central Bank, died today at a moment when his creation, the euro, is under threat. According to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, “everybody” has been “screwed” by the euro.  Berlusconi’s statement is generally perceived as marking the beginning of the campaign for the Italian general elections of May 2006. A shrewd politician, the Prime Minister is expressing the gut feeling of many Italians.

According to this week’s Economist the Sinn Féin statement announcing the end of the IRA’s armed activities was delayed so that it would not “be overshadowed by the new, more violent terror campaign being waged by jihadis on the British mainland.” Were the IRA bombs that killed civilians in pubs and shopping streets less violent than al-Qaeda’s? The only difference, as far as I can see, is that the IRA members did not believe in blowing up themselves in the process. Does that make them less violent than suicide bombers?

In the late 1970s, when I was living in England, The Guardian was the most Soviet friendly of all British broadsheet newspapers, constantly trying to find excuses for Soviet behaviour by implying that the West was morally at least as evil as its adversaries. Apparently The Guardian has learned no lessons from the fall of Communism in 1989.

First in an occasional series. Magazines found in the European Parliament's newsagent.

Woman's Outlook - Official Journal for the Women of the National Rifle Association.

Brussels, the capital of Belgium but also of the European Union and of NATO, is not prepared for a terrorist attack. After a warning by the chief of the Brussels fire brigade that his men would never be able to cope with an attack on more than one underground station, Véronique Paulus de Châtelet, the Governor of Brussels, confirmed on Tuesday that Brussels does not have an emergency plan in case of an attack by al-Qaeda or other likeminded criminal organisations.

Nicolas Sarkozy,  the French minister of the Interior, is an atypical Frenchman. Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian father who fled Communism at the end of the Second World War, and a mother who was herself the daughter of a Greek immigrant. “I like the frame of mind of those who need to build everything because nothing was given to them,” he says when asked about his upbringing.  The experiences of his youth have made Sarkozy a pro-American Frenchman. Pro-American Frenchmen are rare although one of the greatest admirers of America of all times, Alexis de Tocqueville, was a Frenchman.

Tocqueville (1805-1859) was born 200 years ago, on 29 July 1805. He became known through his books “Democracy in America” (published in 1835 and 1840 in two volumes after a visit to the United States) and “The Old Regime and the Revolution” (a history of the French Revolution of 1789, published in 1856).