Link Banana

Strange Maps highlights a study of the genetic commonality of Europeans. Finland’s a striking outlier. Other observations:

The extent of genetic variation is greater north to south than east to west. This may be a result of the way Europe was colonized by modern humans, i.e. from the south, in three successive waves of migration (45,000 years ago, where before there had only been Neanderthals; 17,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age; and 10,000 years ago, with the advent of farming techniques from the Middle East).

Yugoslav genetic variation is quite large (hence the big pink blob), and overlaps with the Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech and even the Italian ones.

There is surprisingly little overlap between the northern and southern German populations, each of which has more in common with their other neighbours (Danish/Dutch/Swedish in the northern case, Austrian/Swiss/French in the other one).

The Swiss population is entirely subsumed by the French one, similarly, the Irish population almost doesn’t show any characteristics that would distinguish it from the British one.

From the annals of the slightly absurd:

Rwanda’s government ruffled some French feathers yesterday with the release of a 500-page report alleging that senior French military and political leaders had prior knowledge of the country’s 1994 genocide and that French peacekeeping troops actively participated in the killings. Among those accused are the late former President François Mitterand and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

And the reason to doubt:

Given that the Rwandan government began work on the report just a few months after President Paul Kagame was accused by a French judge of assasinating the Rwanda’s former president — the event that precipitated the genocide — the report is going to be read with a pretty large grain of salt.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that that no gnomes live in France or Italy?

As is always the case with managably sized bar graphs, I’m curious as too all that was left offo this one. The list provided is surprising. Greece easily wins the cigarette consumption race, and the United States beats notoriously-smoky France.

You thought it was just the United States, but now some Chinese patriots are discussing a boycott of all things French.

The latest country to face Chinese wrath is France, which Chinese netizens singled out as the worst embarrassment in terms of the torch relay over the past week (frankly, things weren’t pretty in London or San Francisco either). Citing a human rights banner at Paris city hall and a protester trying to wrench the torch from a Chinese girl in a wheelchair, grassroots sentiment is again spiraling out of control, though only in cyberspace for now. Calls for boycotts of French companies — including L’Oréal, Louis Vuitton and Givenchy — have appeared on Web sites and chatrooms.  Meanwhile, Xinhua ran a story today biting back at the French media entitled “Paris slaps its own face.”

Also about China: Channeling Sex in the City in Beijing. (via Mr. Fallows)

James Traub’s profile of French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner from last weekend’s New York Times Magazine’s not perfect, but it’s certainly good.

Kouchner claims to know pretty much everything and everyone by heart. One of Rony Brauman’s jokes is, “The guy must be four or five hundred years old; he’s spent 30 years in every critical situation worldwide.” But in Lebanon, at least, it was true. He had been going there since 1975, when he, Aeberhard and others established a hospital in Nabaa, a poor Shiite neighborhood, in the midst of the civil war. He knew all the Shiite leaders and often their fathers and brothers; and the Sunnis and Christians as well. “We embrace each other, we tutoie each other, we are angry at each other, we hold hands, we joke, we say ‘shut up’ to each other,” Kouchner explained to me on the plane. Lebanon’s Christian army had “designated me for death,” as he liked to remind the Christian warlords. These rivals, who were barely talking to one another, would speak to him without posturing, he said. Kouchner felt that he could make a difference. Then again, Kouchner almost always feels that he can make a difference.