Well, MMDCXXXVI, actually.
That’s how many posts WordPress tells us we have put up in four and a half years of AFOE. It’s been a while since we marked an anniversary. Europe Day seems as good a time as any to thank the authors, the guests, and especially the readers who have made and continue to [...]

Jason Burke of the Observer reports that the next few days are expected to bring the indictment of people involved in Ergenekon. Ergenekon? Well, if you read AFOE you’ll already know that Ergenekon is a secret extreme-right network of influence within the Turkish elite, suspected of being behind a succession of acts of violence, which [...]

This post reminded me a lot of Vienna University in 2001-2002; I was there as a SOCRATES student, still actually a member of the Labour Party, while the strange times we live in began. I also first encountered the word “blog” around about then, and indeed visited the Blogger front page, but for some reason [...]

So is May Day a holiday where you live? It is in Sweden. (Well, obviously.)

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 [...]

One of Nicolas Sarkozy’s worse ideas is the retention de securite, a change to the law that would allow for prisoners who complete their sentences to not be released if the government thought they were of “particular dangerousness” - this being an executive decision and hence very likely to be taken for reasons of low [...]

Not quite our namesake, but a fistful of these will be pretty darn cool, too.
(Thanks to Making Light for the tip and the title. A Slovene cent turned up in my change the other day; no sign yet of Cypriot or Maltese euros.)

Blogging in the 18th century:
One of the distinctive features of the periodical literature of this era was its discursive, dialogical character. Many of the articles printed in the Berlin Monthly (Berlinsche Monatsschrift), for example, the most distinguished press organ of the German late enlightenment, were in fact letters to the editor from members of the [...]

“All religions are just as good as each other, as long as the people who practice them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them”(1)
As quoted in Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947, by Christopher Clark, [...]

Hungarian intellectuals are protesting against the owner of the newspaper Magyar Hirlap, after the paper started printing some genuinely shocking anti-semitic opinions. Specifically, its new columnist Zsolt Bayer took it on himself to describe “the Budapest Jewish journalists” as “justification Jews; their mere existence justifies anti-Semitism”. That’s pretty ugly; it doesn’t help that the trope [...]