European Ombudsman Nikiforos Diamondouros yesterday delivered his report about complaints to the EU in 2005. The press release from his office about it can be found here, plus additional reporting from EUObserver and MaltaMedia. Best of all was his quote about the overall structure of the EU institutions’ administration: The […]
Interesting news today as Ericsson, the telecoms company, offered a voluntary redundancy package to up to 1000 of its staff based in Sweden. The catch is that the offer is only for employees between the ages of 35 and 50. For the full details of the story, see this FT […]
Germany is apparently stepping up its efforts to allow German to have more prominence in Brussels, according to this article from EUObserver. Bundestag president Norbert Lammert wrote in a letter to European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso that the German parliament would refuse to debate EU documents that were not […]
It’s quite important to have a laugh when you are trying to make the first steps learning a foreign language. Swedish has plenty such amusing phrases, normally involving you getting your tongue around horrid sj and sch sounds in Sju sjösjuka sjömän på sjunkande skeppet Shanghai sköttes av sju sköna sjuksköterskor. However my personal favourite is […]
Romano Prodi has started to talk about Europe. Not a surprise really – he is a former Commission President after all, and plenty of people hoped his approach to the EU would be quite a lot more positive than Berlusconi’s had been. But what does Prodi actually want, and is […]
After more than 24 hours of intrigue and wrangling, it looks like Prodi’s Unione has managed to achieve the narrowest possible victory in the Italian election. The margin for the Camera was something ludicrous like 0.06% but the election system means Prodi will get 55% of the seats. For the […]
The exit polls in the Italian election look quite promising – graphics from Corriere della Sera here. It seems that Prodi’s Unione is about 5% ahead for both the Camera and the Senato. While we all know Prodi has his faults (there are few who worked with him in Brussels […]
First impressions are sometimes quite revealing. I saw the headline a few moments ago on BBC News Online Italy foils election terror plot. My first thought: what is Berlusconi’s government trying to do now to blur the facts? The BBC article that you can read here takes the threat reasonably […]
Sometimes it takes you a bit of time to digest the full significance of an event that happened to you. Such was the case this evening on Tremadoc Road, just a few streets away from Aristotle Road where I live in South London. I was trying to distribute the hundreds […]
Wednesday last week I headed off to Wembley Conference Centre to sit the ‘pre-selection’ tests to become an EU civil servant – the dreaded concours. I’ve written a bit about it on the blog before. True to form, the tests contained some downright ludicrous questions. This was the best among […]
John Reid used to have a reputation as Tony Blair’s firefighter. The person to send into a government department to sort it out. Then after the 2005 election, the macho Scot was given the macho job in government – Minister of Defence. The change in the UK’s geopolitical standpoint over […]
The only thing about the French attitude to competition to appear in this blog in recent times has been the discussion of the GDF/Suez merger in the energy sector, a merger that has largely been seen as a case of economic patriotism. So it was with some scepticism that I […]
