Continuing our wall-to-wall coverage of this event, here is a reasonable approach to coping with it. Commentary one year when Spain gave Germany an inordinate number of points: “I see Mallorca has just cast its votes.”

Further to my Eurovision piece yesterday, BBC News has an article about the costs of hosting the contest. Funding changes now mean that the host broadcaster doesn’t have to pay the full cost, with over 50% or more being paid for by the EBU, but Estonia spent it’s entire tourism budget for 2002 - $26million [...]

The Financial Times reports today on Deutsche Telekom’s first quarter results. The expected fall in the domestic fixed-line business was compensated for by a 12 per cent rise in revenues on the part of T-Mobile. A big part of this increase is due to the fact that they added a record 1.2m net [...]

On Saturday night the people of Europe will come together. Gathered together around their television sets across the entire continent, they will jointly watch a broadcast from Istanbul that will highlight European culture, bring all the nations of the continent together in unity and show the vibrant, dynamic future of Europe.
Well, that’s the theory. In [...]

Everybody (well; nearly everybody) is aghast at revelations that US troops have been routinely torturing Iraqi detainees. One predictable consequence of the scandal is a return to that much-loved hypothetical, ‘Should torture be permitted where the information it may produce could save innocent lives that are in real, imminent danger?‘.

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Anthony Wells looks at some of the fringe candidates standing in Britain’s elections to the European Parliament

Well clearly a lot of things are worrying me, many of them right now associated with the grizzly images of human suffering and degradation (both those which are intensely individual and those which are collective and for that seemingly more anonymous) which we cannot avoid contemplating day in day out. Against these images [...]

The NY Times takes an interesting look at the American electoral chessboard. As expected, both the Bush and Kerry campaigns will have an even harder time tracking down the marginal American voter than Bush and Gore had in 2000.

The Guardian’s Euroblog - a record of the European election campaign written by three British MEPs - Roger Helmer, Richard Corbett and Sarah Ludford (found via Doctor Vee)

This may seem to be a story about goings-on in a far distant land, but then again some of the implications may arrive a lot nearer home than we may like to admit. Most of you will have noticed that in recent days the press has been full of material about a Japanese pensions scandal. [...]