Some European MPs sure love to control everything, as Alex’ post Horrible European Surveillance Proposals already demonstrated. It may be old news to some of you, but check out this motion for a European Parliament resolution (pdf) by Estonian MEP Marianne Mikko entitled Draft report on concentration and pluralism in the media in the European [...]

Only a couple of days before the big European sporting event of 2008 kicks off in Austria and Switzerland. Who will be crowned European football champion of 2008 in Vienna on June 26th?
For my own country The Netherlands, which finds itself in a Group of Death with France, Italy and Romania, the odds do [...]

It is reading time again here at AFOE. I am happy to invite you to read The politics of Chaos in the Middle East by Olivier Roy. If you like the world to be simple and easy to understand then you will hate The Politics of Chaos.
Olivier Roy offers his readers a descriptive overview of [...]

The associative mind works in mysterious ways. At least, mine does. The New York Times has an amazing article today called Bacteria Thrive in Inner Elbow; No Harm Done about, as the title suggests, the countless bacteria that live in and on our bodies. It turns out humans are really individual ’superorganisms’. What caught my [...]

In The Netherlands cartoon artist Gregorius Nekschot has been arrested following complaints by imam Abdul-Jabbar van de Ven that his work discriminates against, notably, Muslims and dark-skinned people. I really do not have the time right now to write a decent post about this and I am also waiting for more information, but Dutch weblog [...]

Just a short linkdump post. Newsweek has an interesting opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria entitled The Rise of the Rest that ties in nicely with my previous post Uncomfortable thoughts and philosophy. Zakaria is much more positive about the emergence of new global powers, even when he understands the transition engenders some degree of anxiety:
American [...]

It is a good thing I am not a journalist, since I often forget to write down the source of interesting comments I hear on, for instance, television. Come to think of it, this makes me a lousy blogger too. Anyway, recently my beloved Arte had an item on India as an emergent world [...]

New Europe-based weblog Escape Indifference has an interesting post on higher education in Germany called Not welcome in Germany. Chris Osman, the author of the weblog, is a student at a German university. In his post he compares German universities with their American counterparts and finds the Unis lacking in both quality and openness. He [...]

From The New York Times, Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the USA:
“Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he said.
Then, on the issue of child abuse within the Church (emphasis mine):
For the second day on his first official visit to America, the pope acknowledged the “deep shame” [...]

As you all know, the Olympic torch barely made it through London. And the Chinese are pissed off about it. IOC president Jacques Rogge was not pleased either. From BBC News
“Violence for whatever reason is not compatible with the values of the torch relay or the Olympic Games,” he said.
Okay, first question for our readers [...]