Contrary to public belief in Slovakia and Hungary, the members of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia are proud citizens of their country. A survey conducted within the European Values Survey found that 71% of the ethnic Hungarians are ‘proud’ to be citizens of Slovakia. Members of the majority Slovakians are 87% proud of their newish [...]

Here’s a briefing that E3G is providing to MEPs ahead of next week’s Environment Committee votes. Original post by markjohnston

Fake obituaries appeared on the streets of Belgrade, claiming the EU’s High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy dead. The placards were placed on Kosovo Street and around the Serbian parliament in downtown Belgrade. The text reads (approximately) ‘Our beloved Javier Solana has died in the 66th year of his sinful life. We [...]

Bernard de Montferrand, ambassadeur de France en Allemagne, vient de lancer un blog du même nom, “Bernard de Montferrand“, en français et en allemand ! Cette décision n’est pas inspirée par “sanssouci”, puisque Monsieur l’Ambassadeur avait mis en place le même type de blog lorsqu’il était au Japon… Mais à la racine du projet, on [...]

In the wake of the financial meltdown, governments are taking steps to ensure its containment, ultimate recovery and how to prevent a recurrence. Individual countries have lost to globalisation their sovereignty to act alone. They can only recover it collectively by introducing an effective system of multilateral governance, certainly not by economic nationalism As […] [...]

13-15 October 2008, Strasbourg, France EDRi is a partner of the PrivacyOS project – a thematic network for privacy protection infrastructure within the current European Commission´s ICT Policy Support Programme. The general objectives of PrivacyOS are to create a long-term collaboration in the thematic network and establish collective interfaces with other EU projects. Participants will [...]

The headlines this morning concentrate primarily on the rough financial times to come. How is the EU going to respong to all this? Their proposed bail-out is much smaller than that of the US, which by the way, it DID NOT PASS. Do you believe that the end of US  supremacy has come? Original post [...]

Christopher Perrien, our key-note speaker at our next Open Day FRINGE event on Web 2.0 and knowledge management (more info in my post below) sent a real interesting link to a blog on knowledge management and community building (”This guy might interest you”), which I would like to share with you all: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/   P.S. I should mention [...]

Dear reader (if any): This is my first blog entry ever, so I hope you’ll be patient with me. I would like to start this blog by inviting you to a workshop in Brussels, which I think should be really interesting for those who working in the field of regional development and innovation: We are [...]

Remember the date – 29th September 2008 – the day everything changed. In the UK, Bradford and Bingley has finally been put out of it’s misery. The buy to let bubble has finally burst. It wasn’t necessarily a big bang, but I’d imagine that yesterday the value of every UK residential property dropped by several [...]

Should a government bail out a sick bank, insurance company, hedge fund or investment company? This is a tricky question to both ask and answer. As I write, the Dow has just closed down by over 770 points on news that the US$700 billion bail out package has not approved. This appears to be a [...]

Mit dem Mitgliedsantrag fängt es an, später kommen Manifeste und zu guter Letzt Memoiren. Was bewegt einen Politiker dazu, sich schreibend zu betätigen? Ein vergleichender Blick nach Deutschland und nach Frankreich bringt interessante Einsichten. Die französischen Sozialisten sind gerade sehr mit sich selbst beschäftigt. Der im November stattfindende Parteitag soll zur Krönungsmesse für den neuen [...]

A quick look at popularity polls in the United States suggests that the current Presidential election race is very close and could possibly ‘go either way’. But can it really? I would suggest that Obama is actually a solid 10 points behind and heading for a significant defeat. Is the race not actually all over [...]