A short interruption in the service

I shall be away till Monday evening and as I am going to Paris, I refuse to take my laptop or spend any time on the computer. There are far better things to do, not least meeting with some like-minded individuals. (Oh yes, they do exist in France as well.)

In the meantime here is a jolly story about organizers of an art exhibition who dared to criticize the close link between the Orthodox Church and the Russian state (nothing new there) being on trial for blasphemy. I found it on Tom Palmer's blog. Tom, whom I met a couple of times in Washington DC is a one-man operation for the spread of ideas of freedom in the most unlikely parts of the world, specifically in the former Soviet Union. He goes to the more difficult parts, like Kyrgyzstan and the other stans rather than the highly accessible Baltic States. Personally, I think that there is a long way to go till the ideas of freedom take root in Central Asia but when they do, it will be thanks to Tom Palmer and a few hardy souls like him.