Ségoléne Royal is coming in with a wet sail in the French Socialists’ primary election tonight, according to early results. Final data should be out around 0300GMT, but the signs are all there - Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s man of business, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, has conceded defeat and wished her all good luck, Laurent Fabius’s campaign manager has [...]

I see from EurActiv that the Bulgarians are runing into some linguistic trouble over the single currency:
The country has expressed concern over the differences between Bulgaria’s Cyrillic and the EU’s Latin alphabets, in response to renewed European Central Bank (ECB) demands that ‘euro’ be spelled and pronounced with a ‘u’ and not a ‘v’ [...]

So the Kosovar Albanians are counting the days until the January 21 elections in Serbia.
Not because they care who wins. If they have a preference, they’d probably want the loathsome nationalist Radical party to win, since that would immediately turn Serbia into an international pariah (again) and make Kosovar independence that much easier. [...]

Todd Underwood of Internet consultants Renesys has an interesting post for the day AMSIX, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, set the world record for Internet traffic through a single facility. At 2110 CET on Monday, the world’s biggest IX saw more than 200 gigabits a second of netty goodness hurtling through its multiple 10GB Ethernet switches. [...]

I should know better than to visit Arts & Letters Daily when I am up to my ears in work. The wealth of reading material found there provides the ideal excuse for procrastination. “Hey, I am doing something intellectual here”. Nevertheless, after having resisted the temptation to go there for a while, I finally succumbed [...]

This small post serves as an addendum to my previous posts on religion. Yesterday a group of prominent world figures met in Istanbul to discuss tensions between Muslims and Western Societies. The group, The Alliance of Civilizations, including Desmond Tutu and Mohammed Khatami, concluded that:
The chief causes of the rift are not religion or history, [...]

So Serbia has finally called for elections.
I admit that I was wrong about this government’s tenacity. I predicted back in July that the government would collapse in October. Not so. It has staggered on, month after month… gasping, retching, coughing blood, but somehow refusing to die. It bought a few weeks [...]

Sargasso, Dutch weblog and co-nominee in the recent BOB’s has a very interesting post on European energy policy, which prompted me to address the issue here as well. The point of my own post here on AFOE is not to elaborate extensively on European energy policy, I simply do not have the time right [...]

In Italy people can choose to assign a small amount of their taxes, 0.8 percent, to a favourite good cause, the so-called otto per mille*. This contribution either goes to the Catholic or Lutheran Churches, or the State. The State is supposed to use the money for well-defined humanitarian, environmental and cultural causes. At [...]

Deutsche Welle’s “Bobs” Cermony in Berlin, photo by ix
paidcontent.org, Rafat Ali’s great blog and, not at all ironically, flourishing micropublishing business about the economics (well, actually more the business) of digital content. Congratulations!
I haven’t found any English blog covering the Award Ceremony taking place in Berlin right now, but if you can read German, check [...]