at the expense of the airlines. (Don’t miss the more serious Europe-stuff in the posts below.)
Mark A.R. Kleiman summarizes a recent experience flying the friendly skies:
In general, the performance of every United employee I dealt with today convinced me that the airline has identified its basic strategic problem as an excess of customers; I plan [...]

Aside from revealing the extent to which internecine warfare seems to have broken out in the CDU camp, I was pretty much stopped in my tracks by this statement in Heinrich von Pierer’s interview with the FT:
�The important problems, such as the ageing of the population or what kind of immigration policy we need, are [...]

The Financial Times reports this morning that EU Commission President Jos� Barroso is about to launch a major ‘deregulation campaign’. He is reported as saying that he was determined to get the Commission to embrace better regulation, to carry out more systematic impact assessments and to make more frequent use of the option of [...]

Today’s Handelsblatt reports that a poll carried out for N24 TV shows the CDU stabilising in the polls after last week’s Schr�der Surge. The CDU was on 42%, up 1.5%, with the FDP on 6%, down 0.5%, putting the Festival of Sternness Coalition on 48.5%. The SPD sank back one percentage point to 33.5%, with [...]

Earlier this year, Eurobarometer started asking members what they thought about future EU expansion. The results (which can be found here, as a pdf) were pretty interesting.
52% of Europeans support membership for Croatia, while only 34% oppose it. (War criminals? What war criminals?) And 50% support membership for Bulgaria. But [...]

You already know, because Alex has been doing such a good job of making sure you do, that the impending German elections will be as close-run as the related campaign has been shambolic. According to the polls, the Union and FDP will outpoll the currently governing SPD-Green coalition; but not by enough for a majority. [...]

Following Alex, more opinion polls seem to be showing that Merkel will struggle to get a majority in partnerhip with the FDP. At the same time voices are being raised within the CDU suggesting that the principal responsibility for this debacle lies with the Professor from Heidelberg.
Some indication of why flat tax ideas might [...]

One of our lurkers turns out to be from the Media section of the European Parliament. Today and tomorrow the EP is webcasting a conference on technology and democracy, with a prominent role for blogs.
Mystery in European Parliament…!
just like you, the European Parliament is well aware of the increasing power and importance of blogging, which [...]

Back in July, I posted about the Parliamentary elections in Albania. Dedicated readers may recall that the Socialist government of PM Fatos Nano lost, and the opposition Democrats (under former PM Sali Berisha) won… but that Nano was refusing to concede defeat.
Well, he finally did. It took nearly two months, and three special [...]

I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large - Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 - so it takes a while if you go to [...]