The picture is from lap 8 of Sunday’s Montréal Roller Marathon. Ouch, what a race. First of all, the weather – 6 degrees at the start, and very windy. The race is around the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve – on an island in the St Lawrence river. Hence little protection from […]
The European Commission today announced a record €1.06 billion fine for Intel for anti-competitive behaviour – essentially for striking deals with PC manufacturers to prevent them buying chips from rival AMD. More details from European Voice here. €1.06 billion is a hefty fine, and even on its own would equate […]
OK, I am putting 2+2 together and making 10, but if I get this one right then you heard it here first! 😉 Andy Carling, a regular commenter on this blog, stated that he had heard Poul Nyrup Rasmussen say at a press conference that the PES does have a […]
Every other British political party has their eye off UKIP. First of all the 4th June European Parliament elections are happening a year or so before a general election and UKIP are not a threat at national level. So as Labour, Tories and Lib Dems shadow box for the national […]
I’ve been hammering on and on at the PES and the issue of why socialists have not been able to nominate a candidate for President of the Commission to follow Barroso when the Portuguese’s term of office ends 31st October this year. The story behind all of this gets immensely […]
Some other EU bloggers (see Dominika Pszczółkowska and Tony Barber) are concerned about the rather poor turnout at the Eastern Partnership summit in Prague this week. But is it remotely surprising? And should we care? The Czech Presidency has been a farce – Topolanek who tried to hold it together […]
What’s up with Germany? What do they have to hide? I attended a press conference organised by farmsubsidy.org yesterday entitled “Who wants to be a farm subsidy millionaire?” where Jack Thurston, Brigitte Alfter and others presented the latest data on CAP payments using the latest statistics on agriculture spending due […]
The European Parliament has just put out this video on Youtube saying that’s it’s never too late to vote. Well, who should you actually vote for? Not UKIP as far as I’m concerned… So I produced a little remix:
This is the view that greeted me when walking from Schuman to my Brussels flat this morning – a smashed up TV just lying on the pavement. Presumably the owner didn’t know it had to be put in a special white bag, the street sweepers in the commune of 1000 […]
München is in the middle of the election fever campaign for 7th June European elections and this has prompted a whole load of parties to come up with their election posters. Foremost among them is the CSU, in danger of not polling 5% of the votes nationally in Germany and […]
Peter Hain has had a good old rant at the BNP in Comment is Free and this is followed up with a Guardian story on how the BNP could get £2 million of EU funding. But these pieces are not all that they seem. First of all, what motivates people […]
I spent an hour or so last night putting together this first-ever Youtube video mashup I’ve done, taking the German trailer for Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) and adding subtitles in English – only the subtitles are about UK civil liberties issues in 2009. The idea comes […]
