A friendly Irishman in Brussels has e-mailed me a link to the Spoofer’s Guide to How To Not Vote No to the Treaty of Lisbon. You can download the PDF here, and it’s linked from Ciaran Tolan’s website (a guy who looks a lot more serious than Jason O’Mahony who […]
I’ve just been past Schuman roundabout, still blocked off by masses of police, loads of barbed wire barriers, and hundreds of police. They have been looking after 300 disgruntled French fishermen protesting about the price of fuel for their boats. In typical Brussels style there were 4 water cannon trucks […]
My old MP Paul Flynn is in Brussels at the moment with the Public Administration Select Committee from the House of Commons and in his typically thoughtful and visceral way he has a go at the ‘dark arts of lobbying’ in Brussels. Look at Brussels from the outside and the […]
I was informed a couple of months ago about a system – QDOS – that tried to compare the online profile of Silvio Berlusconi and Walter Veltroni, and Berlusconi scored higher. While writing my previous post about that I started to wonder: what MEPs have the highest online profile? I […]
Just a quick post to highlight some interesting research conducted by Institut pour un Developpement Durable that looks at pouvoir d’achat (spending power). With rising food prices and oil prices there are complaints all over Europe that spending power is decreasing. Yet the research for Belgium, by Philippe Defeyt, shows […]
Via Gulf Stream Blues I’ve come across some of the utter rubbish Tony Blair has been saying about religion over the past few days. “Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century.†Eugh! It makes me feel sick. […]
The Tories are getting themselves in a nice mess about the selection of the MEPs for the 2009 European elections – Conservative HQ is refusing to release the numbers of votes the sitting MEPs received from the party members, and Conservative Home is getting all worked up about it (background, […]
So the EU is going to get an equivalent of Facebook (Daily Telegraph, EUObserver). Well, no, it’s not that – it’s a social network of sorts, but it’s not a rival to Facebook (although you could use Facebook to do something similar). Myparl.eu promises to be a system to allow […]
I have no idea whether it’s viable, or whether he would consider it, but I think I have – from a personal point of view – come up with a candidate I would actually like to see as President of the European Commission: Pascal Lamy. He has a background as […]
When something is a fresh project you’re always willing to try the latest, brightest, most shiny new software for it. Problem is that this blog is no longer that! With 780 posts in 3 years, 110000 individual visitors in the last 12 months, 3Gb monthly data transfer, and a number […]
Problems at Sizewell B nuclear power plant were partly to blame for blackouts in the UK yesterday. Costs of nuclear decommissioning are due to soar above the £73bn already calculated, announced on Tuesday this week. So Gordon Brown states yesterday how keen he is for the UK to build new […]
OK, there are 142.2 million people in Russia, Europe’s largest country voting in Eurovision. San Marino, the smallest, has a mere 20000. But when it comes to the votes allocated in Eurovision each county’s votes count equally. If you think the EU’s Qualified Majority Voting system for legislation is bad, […]
