On February 6th, just when I thought it was actually possible to escape the ?German reform debate? for only a couple of days, on the way from the slopes to the fireplace, Gerhard Schroeder hit back through the airwaves. A coalition of campaigning regional party establishment and the inevitable loony lefties had apparently won their [...]

According to the conservative German newspaper Die Welt(German, free registration required), the EU is about to send a team to Jerusalem to seriously investigate alligations of EU funding for the Palestinian Authorities being embezzled to the benefit of Palestinian terrorist organisations (also - EUObserver)

This is big - and will be even bigger for the French right. Alain Jupp?, brilliant but aloof former Prime Minister in the first instance found guilty of illegal party financing - reports from the BBC, the NYTimes, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (German), CNNenespanol (Spanish), and of course, LeMonde (French).

According to the French daily LeMonde, France and Germany intend to establish a prominent European think tank, based in Brussels, to advance European ideas on the World stage (English report from EuObserver).

Davos, Switzerland - Lo?c Le Meur has some videos from a blogging panel at the 2004 World Economic Forum.

Today, the NY Times features a review of recent books on the Bush administrations’ foreign policy.

Europe: adding value, changing quickly - last Monday, the President of the Commission spoke at the LSE about the prospects for a European Constitution (pdf).

As next weekend’s Brussels EU summit about the constitution is approaching quickly, it’s only too normal that all national players are digging their trenches and defence lines by publicly downplaying the importance of an agreement if the “national price to be paid is too high” while Europhiles of all nations are trying to increase pressure [...]

It’s not a particularly European topic, but one I simply had to report. I just received a newsletter from the European Journalism Center pointing to a BBC story about the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda handing life sentences to several radio “journalists” who had called for the genocidal slaughter of Tutsis in 1994 including communicating [...]

there’s probably nothing more stimulating than brushing up one’s legal knowledge about the EU by reading a fistful of accession treaties including all appendices to the annexes IV, V, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII and XIV in their entirety (pdf) - via Handakte.de (German).