Britain, that country known for inventions such as the railway, football, the jet engine… and the Sonic Teenager Deterrent. This is the depths to which we seem to have sunk in the UK when it comes to dealing with problematic teenagers. See this summary from ITN, and this amusing piece […]
Britain tends to be even worse at the Winter Olympics than in most other major sports championships. We don’t have much snow, we don’t have many ice rinks, and hence we don’t get many medals. Women’s curling is normally about as fun as it is supposed to get. But today […]
The European Parliament has today finally voted Evelyne Gebhardt’s report on the Services Directive, otherwise known as the Bolkenstein / Frankenstein Directive if you are one of those people scared of it. As one of the people who has read the original Directive, I am not one of the people […]
There has been a lot in the news this week about birds, especially bird flu. Maybe it’s a bit bad taste, but I have been meaning to upload this alternative, animated version of the UK’s EU Presidency logo for a while. The UK Presidency logo had also run into problems […]
Thanks to a comment today by VXL, I was informed that RSS was not working on this blog for some reason. Seems there was some bug with the Atom feeds in particular. Anyway, for the moment RSS 0.92 and 2.0 seem to be working OK – hope that is sufficient […]
Having spent time in Sweden that has such a ban already, and having recently been repulsed by too much smoking in public in Austria, it’s with great joy that I heard the news this evening that the UK will get a full smoking ban in pubs and restaurants. Further, MPs […]
Shows how much of an EU-geek I am that the only time I have been to the theatre recently was this weekend to watch The Schuman Plan at Hampstead Theatre. Details of the show from the theatre’s website here. Yet while the idea of putting the history of the European […]
Anyone who vaguely follows EU politics may have heard of the so-called Vaxholm case, a dispute between 2 Swedish trade unions and a Latvian firm that was carrying out work in Sweden and not respecting collective wage bargaining agreements there. The issue cuts at the heart of the Nordic labour […]
From The Guardian today: The furious international row over the publication of cartoons satirising the prophet Muhammad intensified today when Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed it was an Israeli conspiracy motivated by anger over Hamas’ win in the Palestinian elections. Sorry, but this is just ludicrous. The cartoons […]
The Jyllands-Posten row goes on and on, and the trade and security implications for the EU in general, and Denmark in particular, are getting more and more severe. Newspapers in most European countries – with the notable exception of Britain – have now published the cartoons in some kind of […]
I have recently come across Eurotopics, a daily news bulletin put together in English, French and German by the Bundeszentrale f√?r politische Bildung. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. It’s a free, simple daily e-mail bulletin that scours Europe’s newspapers each morning, and e-mails concise summaries and links to […]
Things have gone from bad to worse with this row over the cartoons of Muhammad that first appeared in Jyllands-Posten last year. For an excellent and concise overview of what has been happening, see this blog entry from Robert Lindsay. Right, so let’s put a few things straight. The cartoons […]
