Cyberculture agenda: Instagram’s Justin Bieber Problem fixed… “Inside the Aaron Swartz Day hackathon…

How Instagram Solved Its Justin Bieber Problem Wired Top Stories by Cade Metz Back in the day, Bieber pics would receive so many “Likes” that they’d crash Instagram. Here’s how they fixed it. Inside the Aaron Swartz Day hackathon Newsweek Columnists: Christopher Dickey by Seung Lee Golden light flooded the room through the tall, stained windows all … Read more

Cyberculture agenda: @zeynep piece on Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson…

 Here is Zeynep Tüfekçi’s piece. *********************** Pop-Up Ad Inventor Apologizes for Creating a ‘Fiasco’  Mashable! by The Atlantic Ron Carlson’s short story “What We Wanted To Do,” takes the form of an apology from a villager who failed to protect his comrades from marauding Visigoths. It begins: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson  Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin   A prison visit with The … Read more

Snowden gets two Asylum offers and a proposal… Global Heat Map of Protests in 2013

  Venezuela, Nicaragua Offer Asylum to Snowden Edward Snowden might finally get what he’s been looking for: a safe haven to avoid facing justice in the United States. On Friday, the Presidents of both Venezuela and Nicaragua said they could offer the NSA whistleblower asylum. Ex-Russian spy Anna Chapman proposes to Snowden on Twitter NSA … Read more

Eurosphere roundup: “EU agrees guidelines for rescue fund…

EU agrees guidelines for rescue fund Eurozone finance ministers agree guidelines on how the eurozone’s emergency bailout fund can inject money directly into struggling banks. Q&A: Albanian parliamentary election Albania election seen as test of democratic progress Q&A: the Greek crisis revisited Greece?s woes are again troubling eurozone policy makers and rattling markets as renewed … Read more

Eurosphere roundup: Neo-Nazi trial, EU member states stand on bank bail-in plans, Cameron on EU exit…

Neo-Nazi probe is a peerless failure: German report An interim parliamentary inquiry report called the National Socialist Underground (NSU) Neo-Nazi trial: Woman ?part of kill squad? German prosecutors May 14 charged that a woman at the center of a landmark trial over a neo-Nazi   Iceland?s election is a signal to Europe Taking tough measures … Read more

Historic Win for the Pirate Party Movement in Iceland… a cyberculture roundup…

Pirate Party Enters Iceland?s National Parliament After Historic Election Win from TorrentFreak by Ernesto Founded in 2006, the Pirate party movement has scored some big and small victories over the years. Their biggest success came in 2009 when the party won two seats at the European Parliament. During the last year this was followed by … Read more

Eurosphere roundup: “Record unemployment in Europe…

MAIN FOCUS: Record unemployment in Europe | 26/04/2013 from euro|topics According to figures published on Thursday, for the first time more than six million people are currently out of work in Spain, and France also has record unemployment, surpassing a 1997 peak. Commentators fear the ongoing crisis will provoke a rebellion of the masses and … Read more

Today: Anti-austerity protests sweep Europe- Eurosphere roundup

Anti-austerity protests sweep Europe from FT.com – World, Europe Unions across Europe stage day of co-ordinated action, with general strike halting public transport, air travel and closing schools in Portugal and Spain MAIN FOCUS: Southern Europe strikes against austerity | 14/11/2012 from euro|topics Employees in Spain and Portugal are protesting against their governments’ austerity policies … Read more

Iceland and her crowdsourced constitution. Latest news roundup

  Crowdsourcing Iceland’s Constitution New York Times (blog) REYKJAVIK ? Icelanders like to do it their way. Where else do you get to dine on minke whale and puffin and routinely address the prime minister by her first name? True to their tradition of doing things differently, Europe’s most sparsely populated   Finland’s Next Laws To Emerge … Read more

European personalities of the year from Cafe Babel

http://medias2.cafebabel.com/13757/thumb/610/406/italy-nichi-vendola-future-leader-of-italy.jpg

Italy: Nichi Vendola, future leader of Italy?

Catholic, homosexual, communist and ecologist, the Bari-born politician is the only credible alternative to Berlusconism. The problem is that the democratic party (the main opposition party PD) doesn?t like the 52-year-old or his Sinistra, Ecologia e Libertà (?left ecology freedom, SEL) party. Nor has Vendola any representatives in parliament. But the young generation see hope for the future via the left in him. The BBC is dubbing him Italy?s Obama whilst the Italians call him a ?left-wing Berlusconi? (?Berlusconi di sinistra?) (Federico Iarlori, cafebabel.it/ Image: (cc) GhostSwann/ Vincenzo Fiore/ Flickr)

check out the rest which includes a Turkish one!

and a Euro roundup:

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Euro roundup: France working on her identity crisis: banning burqa, chains “illegal” Romas…

MAIN FOCUS: Catalans ban bullfighting | 29/07/2010

from euro|topics

The Catalan parliament in Barcelona on Wednesday passed a ban on bullfighting that will go into effect in the autonomous Spanish region starting 2012. The press writes that rather than being a victory for animal rights over an outdated tradition, the resolution is an expression of Catalan desires for self-determination and clear demarcation from the central power in Madrid.

See no citizens, hear no citizens, speak to no citizens ? the institutional approach to the European citizens? initiative (ECI)

from Jon Worth by Jon

Would you ban the Burka?

from Social Europe Journal by Henning Meyer
Source: Pewglobal.org

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has recently published a very interesting piece of research investigating attitudes towards the full Islamic veil. The results show a remarkable difference between Europeans and US citizens.

Funny, smart commentary about burqa bans

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Observer columnist David Mitchell (half of the comedy team Mitchell and Webb is in fine form today with this column on the absurdity of burqa banning. It was one of those bits of the Sunday paper that had me stopping to read a passage aloud to my wife every ten seconds or so until she snatched it out of my hands and read it herself.

Egypt: Niqab ban in France stirs controversy

from Global Voices Online by Marwa Rakha

Whither EU-US Relations?

from U.S.A.K. Blog

Written by Mustafa Kutlay and Lukas Linsi

The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in November 2008 was accompanied by popular enthusiasm in Europe. During his election campaign he had been given a rapturous reception in Berlin where over 100,000 spectators gathered when he spoke at the Victory Column in Berlin. But the support for Obama in Europe was not confined to a popular movement; also the European political elites pinned their hopes on Obama to improve trans-Atlantic ties after the divisions that marked the era of George W. Bush. After all, Obama was a declared multilateralist in international politics and he seemed ideologically close to the traditions of European social democracies on priority issues on the policy agenda, such as health care reform, climate change and tax reform. At the same time, the European leaders in France, Germany and Great Britain were considered to be exceptionally ?pro-American.? The moment seemed unusually ripe for trans-Atlantic cooperation and it was no surprise that Obama?s first overseas trip as US President led to Europe.

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Iceland may become a haven for investigative journalists

Iceland’s parliament approves legislation to make the country a haven for investigative journalists from Editors Weblog – all postings by Emma Heald Iceland has passed a package of legislation that intends to make the country an international safe haven for investigative journalists, it was reported by the AFP and the Independent among others. The new … Read more

Volcanic ash even clogs Facebook stream!

Iceland volcano

photo credit: Reuters

European airspace closed by volcanic ash

from Wikinews

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Hundreds of thousands of air travellers had their travel plans disrupted in Europe by volcanic ash from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption.

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“‘Wise men’ discuss EU’s 2020 strategy

‘Wise men’ discuss EU’s 2020 strategy

from EurActiv.com
Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero hosted a meeting with prominent EU ‘wise men’ in Madrid yesterday (5 January) to discuss Europe’s economic and social strategy for the next decade. EurActiv Spain reports.

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Party time for Berlin!

People walk next to a miniature representing the Berlin Wall ...

People walk next to a miniature representing the Berlin Wall placed on the bricks at the site of the former wall near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin November 8, 2009. As the highlight of a 5-million euro ($7.4 million) celebration marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, a 1.5-km (one mile) long segment of the Wall will stand for two days along its original route in front of the Brandenburg Gate to the Potsdamer Platz. The row of 1,000 20 kg dominos standing 1.5 metres apart — painted in bright colours by school children and rising 2.5 metres high — will be toppled at the end of a gala ceremony as a symbolic tribute to the collapse of the Wall 20 years earlier.

REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski

Times Online: Berlin all fired up for wall-to-wall partying – by Peter Millar

Tomorrow night, at the climax of the biggest official party seen in Europe, with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, hosting Gordon Brown, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president ? to name but a few ? the slabs will crash into one another like dominos, representing the chain of events that 20 years ago brought the cold war to an end. The first ?domino? will be pushed over, fittingly enough, by Lech Walesa and Miklos Nemeth, the veteran Polish and Hungarian anti-communist campaigners. They will be joined by two other main actors in the drama of 1989: the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the then West German foreign minister.

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