The coffee’s freshly ground, there’s a wide variety of teas and the sticky buns are homemade.
  • “Greece’s Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos has claimed victory in the Pasok party’s leadership election. The 55-year-old ran unopposed in the contest to take over the centre-left party from George Papandreou, who resigned as prime minister in November.”
  • “The EU and human rights groups have strongly condemned the execution of two young men in Belarus following their conviction for a deadly attack on the Minsk metro last April.”
  • “Tension hung thick in the air at a faux-Italian cafe at Sheremetyevo International Airport on a sunny February afternoon. Russia’s highly contentious and best-known gay rights activist Nikolai Alekseyev sent out a final round of press releases on his МacBook as he sipped beer and munched on pizza.”
  • “Brazilian prosecutors say they will bring criminal charges against 17 executives from the US oil company Chevron and drilling contractor Transocean after a new leak of crude. The executives have been barred from leaving the country until the investigation concludes.”
  • “Venezuelan authorities have detained 12 members of an investigative police unit over the fatal late-night shooting of a Chilean diplomat’s teenage daughter while she was riding in a car with her brother.”
  • “Ten Colombian soldiers and an officer have been killed in an attack by rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the army says. The attack happened in the south-east of Colombia near the Venezuelan border. Two other soldiers were injured.”
  • “The two men came from behind as Worachet Pakeerut was parking his car. One of them punched him in the face and the pair sped off on a motorbike. ‘It happened so fast that I couldn’t see their faces,’ the law professor and activist said of the attack that left him bleeding and in need of hospital treatment. ‘Fortunately, other people could see them and were able to describe them to the police’.”
  • “The money and blood pit that is Afghanistan – where the US and Britain have expended more than 2,100 lives and £302bn – is about to start paying a dividend. But it won’t be going to the countries which have made this considerable sacrifice. The contracts to open up Afghanistan’s mineral and fossil-fuel wealth, and to build the railways that will transport them out of the country, are being won or pursued by China, India, Iran, and Russia.”
  • Robert Fisk: “I’m getting a bit tired of the “deranged” soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was “deranged”. Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.