EU deal drops 'free competition'
EU deal drops 'free competition'; Brussels' 50-year commitment to free competition has been dropped from a draft treaty to reform the EU....while EU leaders welcome Malta and Cyprus into eurozone. but Differences at EU summit threaten to plunge bloc into crisis (by Dan Bilefsky).
Europe agrees to disagree
Or, as Der Spiegel puts it, Europe is divided over how to unite. Expectations had been high for the summit in Brussels this week, but, if anything, the meeting of EU leaders just seems to suggest that playing the stubborn card (or even the history card) is popular with the folks back home....
DOSSIER: The EU is seeking a future for itself | 21/06/2007
The European summit beginning in Brussels this Thursday, June 21st, will mainly focus on a new European treaty intended to replace the draft Constitution. The European press notes that positions are very divergent among the 27 countries, but hopes that the European summit will allow participants to reach an agreement....
Bosnia war dead figure announced; An independent study says at least 97,207 people were killed in the Bosnian war in the 1990s.
Austria - Der Standard | Thursday, June 21, 2007
Where will Europe's elite university get its money from?
The European Institute of Technology (EIT), which is supposed to be Europe's answer to elite American universities such as Harvard and the MIT in Boston, is to start running in 2008. Michael Moravec says the whole project is symptomatic of the problems with the EU's research and development policy. "The European Institute of Technology (EIT) will effectively be a small coordinating centre with a staff of 60, and it still isn't even clear where the 300 million euros or so needed for its foundation and the initial phase are to come from. By comparison, Harvard alone has a budget of around three billion euros - per year - and 25,000 employees. There's still no sign of the billions trade and industry are supposed to be providing for the EIT project. The companies have refused to spend money on a concept that lacks substance."
Pour Philip Jenkins, Christianity is back in the Old Continent | Spain - Foreign Policy
The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World
On this map, East and West Germany are next to each other, as one would expect. But Romania’s closest neighbour is Armenia? And Poland and India are side by side? Well, this is not a straightforward geographical map, but a cultural one. It plots out how countries relate to each other on a double axis of values (ranging from ‘traditional’ to ‘secular-rational’ on the vertical and from ‘survival’ to ‘self-expression’ on the horizontal scale). This makes for some strange bedfellows – for example: South Africa, Peru and the Philippines occupy almost the same position, although they’re on three different continents. |
