The Nation’s Critic
Political analyst Anton Pelinka spends a lot of time commuting. A tenured professor of political science at the University of Innsbruck, he also spends a lot of time in Budapest, lecturing at the Central European University, or in the offices of the Institute for Conflict Research on the Heumarkt in Vienna where we met on [...]
Austrian Muslims Take The Veil
Most people have experienced what it’s like to have our heads turned by street fashions – and necks twisted, eyes widened, eyebrows raised. It can make you laugh, or feel sick, or run away. Fashion can do weird things to people. But one of the major head-turners in today’s Europe is the Muslim dress code [...]
Battling Burnout
The International Conference on Burnout and Job Engagement sponsored by Webster University, was the largest ever staged in Europe. And it started with nothing more, and nothing less, than stress itself. But maybe that was as it should be for a gathering of scholars trying to understand what causes the emotional exhaustion, reduced effectiveness and [...]
Ute Bock: Giving Refuge
Even though it’s 17:00, Ute Bock hasn’t eaten anything except a slice of bread and butter all day. The big blue coffee cup on her desk is always refilled. Even at 64, that seems to keep her going through a day when she has already dealt with about 60 cases of refugees and asylum seekers [...]
In Budapest: Unhappy Anniversary
For Hungarians, Oct. 23, 1956 is a day remembered with pride – the day they stood up to Soviet rule, the first communist satellite country to do so. This October, on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising, that pride deteriorated into fierce conflict, leaving behind some of the deepest divisions ever experienced in Hungarian [...]
Anorexics Off The Runway?
“Today the runways are all about measurements,” says Martina Kaskic, a Bosnian-born model based in Vienna. And thanks to first-ever body mass minimums at this year’s Madrid Fashion Week, the thinness of runway models has become the stuff of scandal. The Fashion Week organizers required a Body Mass Index of at least 18, which means [...]
Question & Answer
Vienna Review: In his speech last year to the Webster Vienna graduation, U.S ambassador to Hungary, George Herbert Walker compared Hungary in 1956 to Iraq today, telling his audience he believed “freedom is on the march.” President Bush used the same analogy in his speech in Budapest in June this year. Many of our students [...]
Going Nowhere
On September 6th, more than three months after George W. Bush announced the planned closure of the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention center, he acknowledged that 14 of the most notorious terror suspects – the alleged masterminds of the 9/11 attacks – were to be transferred to the Cuban prison to face eventual trial. On the [...]
Hezbollah’s Victory
At the time of this writing, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is in its 26th day, but for millions of people in the Middle East it is the twenty sixth day of the new political era. This is a new era because it is the first ever war fought against Israel under the banner of [...]
