I gave a speech this week to PES members of the Committee of the Regions about digital communication in the run up to the European Parliament elections. The Q&A with the members was especially interesting, and one question – from
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Category: EU Politics
What should the EU do for libraries?
After having asked myself what libraries are for in my previous post, now the political bit – what can the EU do for libraries? Or what should it do? Ilona Kish from the Public Libraries 2020 programme in Brussels ran
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The personal ethics required to become a politician are the very opposite of what the public hope to see in their politicians
Straightforward honesty, clear ethics, transparency of motives and behaviour, and an ability to acknowledge when one is wrong, are personal values I personally hold dear, and they are – I would argue – values that the general public would like
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What is a library these days?
Today has been my first day at Next Library, a two day conference about libraries and their future that’s taking place at the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek in Kreuzberg in Berlin. While I am super happy to be able to go to something
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Candidates for Commission President 2019 (Spitzenkandidaten)
Prior to the 2014 European Parliament elections I examined all the runners and riders for President of the European Commission and other EU top jobs (2014 posts on President of the Commission: EPP, PES, Others | President of the European
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If you want to talk about getting rid of the clocks changing, you need to talk about time zones – and then it gets messy
So 84% of Europeans want to stop changing the clocks in spring and autumn. And 3.79% of the German population participated in a European Commission consultation. A summary of the details can be found here. So stop changing the clocks
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I’m running for the European Parliament
(NOTE: I did not succeed – this post however remains the same from when I actually was trying to run!) Anyone who has followed this blog over the years knows that I not only write about EU politics here, but
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Transnational Lists: a small step towards a more democratic EU
Tomorrow – Wednesday 7th February – the plenary of the European Parliament votes on a proposal from the Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) committee about the rules for the 2019 European Parliament elections, now just 16 months away in May 2019.
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Is Joseph Mifsud even a legitimate Professor?
In my major post about Joseph Mifsud I put “professor” in inverted commas. That was before I knew the extent of Mr Mifsud’s activities, but now having looked into it, it seems to me that this Professor title Mifsud has
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Gianni Pittella and his “caro amico” Joseph Mifsud
The world has been asking themselves who the “mystery professor” Joseph Mifsud is. The British press – Byline and Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian – have been connecting Mifsud to Alok Sharma and Boris Johnson. Mifsud has good Russian connections
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Joseph Mifsud. The “professor” in the Papadopoulos – Manafort revelations.
The original blog post became so complicated and unwieldy that it has all now been re-organised, although the content is essentially the same. tl;dr: Joseph Mifsud is at the heart of a network of questionable political, business and academic practices,
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Ranked 5th in the Euractiv-ZN #EUInfluencer league table – but what does this mean?
Every one in a while a Brussels media outlet or public affairs firm tries to show they are digital-aware by publishing a kind of league table of something to do with social media in the EU bubble. Yesterday it was
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