As expected
Not that “qualified” I don’t think. Once you’ve gone this far, turning them down isn’t politically viable. They might get a bunch of embarassing transitional arrangements instead.
My semi-informed uniformed view is that waiting until 2008 would have ultimately been better for them, though a longer wait would have been counterproductive.
The European Commission [...]

No doubt the usual suspects will be hugely enjoying the claim by Austria’s hard-right interior minister Elisabeth (Liesl) Prokop that 45 per cent of Muslims are “unwilling to integrate”. In fact, it’s more than a claim - as well as rhetoric, she’s got a “study” to support her election positioning. Unfortunately, the study still isn’t [...]

Controversial “Dutch” politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose true surname is Magan and not Ali, is reported to move to the United States where she will be working for The American Enterprise Institute. She is currently embroiled in a scandal because she had lied about her past to obtain a Dutch passport:
Hirsi Ali said she came [...]

Today more information was released on Hans Van Themsche’s motives for the killings through his lawyer. In my previous post I asked:
Is far-right ideology, in this case Vlaams Belang, responsible for poisoning his apparently unstable mind to such an extent that it would have inevitably led to murder, just like video games or heavy [...]

This is really too good to be true, but we got pictorial evidence.
IT WAS not until midway through the live television interview that the BBC interviewer started to grow suspicious. The man whom she believed to be an expert on internet music downloads seemed to know precious little about his subject.
Not only that, but the [...]

Telegraph | News | Berlusconi rattled as Left-wing president appointed
I missed this part when new Italian president Napolitano was elected.

Read more… or Read more right here… »

Mr Napolitano will swear his oath of office on [...]

It never stops when your blog has to cover an entire continent. Hardly had the Italian left taken AFOE’s advice to get Giorgio Napolitano elected as president than the Clearstream scandal in France was getting out of hand, and nothing at all on the blog! Fortunately, at the moment the news from that quarter is [...]

In the night between May 6th and 7th 2006 five skinheads, coming from De Kastelein, a known extreme right café in West Flanders, beat up Raphaël Mensah, a fifty year old Parisian artist of Gabonese descent, and his thirty seven year old Belgian friend Alain Bouillon. Bouillon was heavily wounded and Mensah is now lying [...]

Daniel Gross: Marc Champion writes in the Wall Street Journal about Eastern Europe’s belated interest in energy efficiency.

EU’s gender gap still wide open
An oldish but interesting (but depressing) little BBC News article. Via Michael.