It’s interesting that Emmanuel’s remarks about biased statistics about the French economy in Anglophone publications led to some comments trying to asses the extent to which France is perceived as “the other”, at least as far as “the West” is concerned. There have always been claims about a natural rivalry of the two main “universalist” [...]

On the day following Israel’s national holocaust memorial day, writing in Haaretz, Fania Oz-Salzberger reminds both Israelis and Europeans that, for centuries, Jewish history has been an enriching element of European history. Concerned about the effect of class trips of “roudy groups” of Israeli teenagers to Auschwitz, she recommends trips to Spain instead -
Take the [...]

Well, sort of. But don’t be scared, gentle readers, I’m not torturing you with a video of myself watching Edward Hugh watching Alex Harrowell watching me watching Edward, thus entirely disregarding the possible value of such a video for media theorists and social psychologists as well as the fact that all the cool kids are [...]

Just a brief note to those who were using our European web aggregator @foe before we had to take it down due to the CMS transition - the aggregator is online again. I will continue to improve a few things in the next couple of days, including adding more feeds, so you may still experience [...]

Welcome back to afoe 3.1 - now running on Wordpress. What I considered to be a weekend’s job - moving a blog of the size of afoe from the multiblog capable Movable Type to the single blog CMS Wordpress and hacking it to the extent necessary to keep the impression of a multiblog - turned [...]

Gentle readers,
should you be concerned about the relative silence on afoe while seemingly everyone else is celebrating the European anniversary, I would like to let you know that, afoe is once again in the midst of an important transition: Following the recent comment spam/Perl-related server issues with our host that forced us to temporarily disable [...]

Right on time for the 5oth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the European Union’s Communications Department, is thinking seriously about establishing a digital “embassy” in the (currently more hyped than) popular virtual reality Second Life. According to a pressetext.at (in German) report, EU spokesperson Mikolaj Dowgielewicz explained that an EU office in Second Life [...]

Gentle readers, as so many other blogs, afoe is having major problems with the way Movable Type, the system we’ve been using to run this blog since 2003, is handling comment spam.
Unfortunatly, as you may have noticed, our host, totalchoicehosting.com, decided this morning that it had to suspend our domain temporarily because of the excessive [...]

Since I doubt anyone of the afoe crew will be anywhere close to a computer when it will happen later tonight, this little announcement about the latest and probably last EU-enlargement in a while will have to do for the time being.
At midnight, Bulgaria and Romania will become members of the European Union, increasing the [...]

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’ [...]