To keep track of the of the legislative process (or not) regarding the controversial EU mandatory data rentention directive(s), Statewatch.org has prepared a heavilly “annotated guide to the issues and documentation.”

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After starting off this year’s early election campaign with a debate about the dangers of the sometimes problematic short term investment horizons of private equity firms, it was the SPD’s very own loony left’s locusts in the party’s board that forced their chairman, Franz Müntefering, to declare that he would not seek re-election at the [...]

This just in: Andrea Nahles has defeated Kajo Wasserhövel for the job of general secretary of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Nahles got in with the votes of the party’s left wing. Wasserhövel, who had managed the SPD campaign in the recent elections, was the protegé of party chairman Franz Müntefering. ‘Former chairman’, I ought to [...]

Things are looking up a bit for Serbia’s economy.
The 1990s were a lost decade for Serbia. GDP declined sharply in the first half of the decade. A modest recovery in 1995-8 was wiped out by the NATO bombing. Per capita income in 2000 was just about where it had been in 1989… [...]

OK, I guess we do do memes here at fistful, but only if they’re actually interesting. I’ve made a Frappr map for fistful readers. Frappr uses Google Maps to show the location of people. It’s quite easy to add your own.

Review-essay in Haaretz on Raymond Aron and the war in Algeria. Very interesting. Via the Heab Heeb

Slate’s Steven A. Cook arguesTurkish military are still plenty powerful.
Their wings have been clipped, but they’re still the big winners in the EU membership process.

Over on almost a diary, I’ve recently mentionend a survey of German blogging called “Weblogs 2005 - Bloggen im deutschsprachigen Raum”, conducted by Jan Schmidt at the University of Bamberg. While the German blogger himself is a relatively unknown species to date, the relatively small size of the German blogosphere as a whole has [...]

So we’re all following the US news, and we know that Bush’s senior aides may be indicted this week for exposing a US spy, right? And the reason the people in the White House deliberately exposed one of America’s own intelligence agents is that they were mad at her husband. And they were mad at [...]

So, President Basescu is unhappy.
This is not unusual. President Basescu is often unhappy. You’d think that, having won the election last December against Prime Minister Nastase, he’d be at least content. But Basescu is a scrapper, and he’s always looking for a fight, and in recent weeks he’s found one. It’s [...]