Earlier today, the draw took place for next year’s European Football Championships (Euro 2004), placing the sixteen teams into four groups:
Group A: Portugal, Greece, Spain, Russia
Group B: France, England, Switzerland, Croatia
Group C: Sweden, Bulgaria, Denmark, Italy
Group D: Czech Republic, Latvia, Germany, Netherlands
The BBC Sport website has a good page detailing all the fixtures for the [...]

Ok, so I do have something to say about the stability pact.
The pact was so flawed that this may have been preferable to actually doing what was supposed to be done, but that does not mean this new “pretend it ’s raining” policy is anything short of terrible. This is astunning failure of political leadership [...]

This was all over the blogosphere a week ago. I didn’t get around to finishing this post until now. EU body shelves report on anti-semitism
I’m with Eugene Volokh, we should withhold judgement. It may be that the report was no good. This pasage makes me suspect so:
“When the researchers submitted their work in October last [...]

Thanks David for the link. I haven’t commented on this because like Dutch finance minister Zalm (who I imagine working away weblogging into the early hours under a dim light provided only by his mobile phone) I am tired. I can’t help feeling that everything that needs to be said has already been said, and [...]

First of all, let me say I’m flattered to be invited to guest-blog on Fistful of Euros, which I’ve long thought was the coolest name of any blog ever.
I’d hazard a guess at two big reasons nobody has much to say about the security pact unraveling: First, there’s simply not that much to say [...]

No one here have said anything about the recent unraveling of the stability pact. That felt after a little weird after seeing that US bloggers Daniel Drezner and Atrios, of all people, have both commented on the issue.
(Edward did write about it on Bonobo Land though)
Drezner links to this article from the Economist, [...]

Sorry, I’m back. I’ve been keeping myself kinda busy over the last two weeks. On my travels I met what you could consider to be a pretty bright programmer: he writes spider programmes. Now if you were silly enough to want to sit in the first few rows of a concert from some [...]

Today’s election day in Northern Ireland, which gives me an opportunity to plug the invaluble Slugger O’Toole.

there’s probably nothing more stimulating than brushing up one’s legal knowledge about the EU by reading a fistful of accession treaties including all appendices to the annexes IV, V, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII and XIV in their entirety (pdf) - via Handakte.de (German).

One thing that I’ve often heard in a half decade or so living and working in Europe is that Americans have no sense of place. Sometimes the idea is asserted that crudely, sometimes equally crudely in a different form: America is too young to have real history, thus Americans have no sense of history and [...]