Inside the Sarko-spin-machine

By Boz

A blog post at The Guardian looks into the PR machine behind Sarkozy's presidency. However, I seriously doubt where this journalist is getting some of his information:

Brown rejects cap on immigration

Gordon Brown says skilled migrants have boosted the UK's economy and rules out an annual cap on immigration.

DOSSIER: Should Wilders be censored? | 31/03/2008 Last week's Internet publication of the film 'Fitna' by the Dutch populist legislator Geert Wilders provoked many reactions in the European press. This short film intersperses violent images of terrorism and executions carried out in Muslim countries with verses from the Koran. Is this kind of provocation defensible in the name of the freedom of expression ? Behind Geert Wilders's veil By Kiki Spiegel has an interview with Ian Buruma in which he discusses the latest controversy surrounding Dutch politician Geert Wilders and his anti-Islam movie. It was an instructive read. The most interesting part of the interview is Burama answers when asked whether Wilders should be compared to Jean-Marie Le Pen (the French Far Right leader) and Jörg Harder (the Austrian Far-Right leader) and whether the Netherland’s guilt over its brush with Fascism made it a liberal and tolerant society for decade: European Muslims stand to win from Dutch film Staying calm, thankfully ONLY A couple of days ago, it seemed hard to imagine that the cause of rationality was going to be greatly advanced by a short film attacking the Koran, put together by the Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders. Then the film was released on the internet on Thursday night, amid lurid predictions of riots and violence. Dialogue of the Deaf: Europe's Muslim 'Problem'   Need to Know - PostGlobal: PostGlobal on washingtonpost.com By Jørgen S. Nielsen Copenhagen, Denmark - In Europe we are anxiously awaiting public reaction to the controversial public showing of a film attacking the Koran, produced by the Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders. This comes on top of trouble already brewing over the republication of the notorious Muhammad cartoons in several Danish newspapers. More than two years after the cartoons’ original publication, it seems we are back where we started, with protests simmering and sometimes descending into violence in various parts of the Muslim world."

European take-off for open skies

 

The first European flight to benefit from the US and European Union "open skies" deal will leave Heathrow later.

Unsolved questions

By David Kovacic

If we look how European Union “complicates” for countries which want to join it, it wonders me, that there are still countries they want to join. Despite that fact that EU is very egoistic about that, making rules for those new countries as would the EU be a promised land,a paradise.

Outbreak of Arseholes in Central Europe

By Alex Harrowell

Hungarian intellectuals are protesting against the owner of the newspaper Magyar Hirlap, after the paper started printing some genuinely shocking anti-semitic opinions. Specifically, its new columnist Zsolt Bayer took it on himself to describe “the Budapest Jewish journalists” as “justification Jews; their mere existence justifies anti-Semitism”. That’s pretty ugly; it doesn’t help that the trope about Budapest Jewish journalists is an old extreme-right standard that reaches back before the Second World War, and which was pulled out of the rhetorical shed, oiled, and sent back out on the track after 1989 to attack the rootless cosmpolitans, etc, who supposedly characterised the revolutionaries.

Interview: EU firms 'too shy' about basic research

Dialogue between big companies and research organisations should be improved in order to boost the EU's innovation potential, argues Michel Cosnard from the French national institute for research in computer science (INRIA) in an interview with EurActiv.

EU members set to demand tougher biofuel standards

Member states look set to demand stricter sustainability criteria for biofuels made from agricultural crops in a bid to avert negative environmental side-effects linked to their mass production, according to a draft paper circulated by the Slovenian Presidency.

Shake-up of digital maps market under EU scrutiny

The European Commission has decided to further investigate the potential negative effects on competition of two mergers that are meant to shake-up the market for navigable digital maps, an essential component of increasingly widespread navigation services.

Equal opportunities for citizens at the EU parliament elections.

By Madarász Csaba

It is not widely known, that the general rights for EU member state citizens are not equal, when we are addressing the issue of European Parliament Elections. Some member states has adopted regulations regarding the voting procedure of EP candidates, which are only let people from the national parliament’s parties to be nominated for EP candidates.

Internet regulation

By Jim Thomson, EAASM Chair

As the biggest unregulated market in the world, the internet leaves patients who choose to buy online at particular risk of counterfeit/substandard medicines. The European Alliance for Access to Safe Medicines (EAASM) is conducting internet research to assess this growing threat. Thus far, some worrying results have been revealed, including:

DOSSIER: The NATO puzzle | 01/04/2008

The expansion of the NATO Alliance will be one of the main subjects at the NATO summit in Bucharest, which begins tomorrow. Croatia and Albania are to be allowed to join; Greece has threatened to veto membership for Macedonia. Georgia and Ukraine also want to join - but the final decision has yet to be made.

Frederick the Great on Immigration and Religion

By Doug Merrill

“All religions are just as good as each other, as long as the people who practice them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them”(1)

European Love for the US and American Isolationism

By Joerg Wolf

"America badly needs to improve its global image," says The Economist in a special survey on "American and the world." The magazine is pretty optimistic regarding the next US president's chances to win back Europe's "love with America" (HT: Atlantic Community):

British, Italian and German architects give Europe a face

Openness, transparency, efficiency: which buildings need a democracy? We span the European parliament, palace, court of human rights and Central Bank

Paris: squats and the second most expensive city in Europe

Amidst an explosion of rental prices, the Macaq organisation squats unoccupied buildings to bring the lack of student housing into the public eye

Babelblogs: Macedonia, cloning and praying in Berlin

Europe is often seen as boring and bureaucratic - not the case with cafebabel.com’s community blogs. European debate is in full swing, bloggers are up in arms and words are flying

Nicolas Sarkozy: the new Edward Heath?

A grave charge

PERHAPS only Britons of a certain age can appreciate the full, malevolent genius of comparing anyone to Edward Heath, Britain's Conservative prime minister for some of the most miserable years of that most miserable of British decades, the 1970s. It is also a brilliantly mad comparison to compare the pompous, prickly Heath—a sort of fat, neutered pussy cat of a man—

European missile defence: the America-Russia-Iran knot , Tom Sauer David Webb

At the Nato summit of heads of state in Bucharest on 2-4 April 2008, the issue of missile defence will figure high on the agenda. The odds are that, without any meaningful parliamentary debate within or between European states, Europe will quietly go along with the United States proposal to instal missile-defence interceptors in Poland and a powerful radar system in the Czech Republic. Moreover, but it appears that further steps will then be taken to integrate this strategic US "national missile defence" system with "theatre missile defence", currently being developed by Nato countries at an annual cost of €1 billion euro ($1.58 bn).

This week in Network Europe

Lobbying of the EU institutions should be subject to full transparency

The European Parliament's Constitutional Affairs committee today voted on a report addressing the framework for the activities of interest group representation in the EU institutions. It will be Parliament's formal response to the Commission's Green Paper on a European Transparency Initiative.

How Britain Now Runs European Security

Daniel Korski: Something odd is happening across Europe's security landscape. In spite of British Prime Minister Brown's euro-scepticism, and Britain's supposed European isolation following the Iraq War, London is once again becoming the centerpiece of European security cooperation.

France caves in to Russia on NATO

By Boz

This morning George Bush gave a joint press conference with President Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine, in which he endorsed the NATO bids of both Georgia and Ukraine ahead of the summit in Bucharest. Meanwhile, Francois Fillon announced on France Inter that France will take the opposite position:

Where France goes, Europe follows

By Boz

The Independent reports that Sarkozy's almost finalized decision to send 1000-odd troops to Afghanistan may spur other European countries to do the same, kind of like a trickle to surge strategy. This according to a "senior British official":