What fuckery is this? It looks like the French government, having failed to impose an awful record-industry inspired snooping act at home, is trying to policy-launder it through the European Union. The so-called “3 strikes” law foresaw that ISPs would be required to cut off service to anyone who was found downloading or distributing copyrighted [...]

Day 1 of the French presidency of the European Council is off to a bad start.   It now seems that both the Czech Republic and Poland will have constitutional struggles over the treaty, with presidents who had been assumed to have mainly titular powers deciding to exercise their right not to sign approved legislation and [...]

That gaggle of elite geeks who have been arguing against the horrible possibilities an internetworked world offers to fraudsters and state bullies for years have often said that one day, there’ll be a horrible crunch. A disastrous moment of truth. As Chernobyl finished the reputation of nuclear power for 20 years, the Privacy Chernobyl will [...]

It wasn’t clear over the weekend how the Zimbabwe crisis could manage to get more complicated but now we know: Morgan Tsvangirai has taken refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare.  It seems that he was left with little choice since, far from seeing his withdrawal from Friday’s “election” as a concession, the state security [...]

As some parts of Europe prepare for Jean-Claude Juncker’s “Club of the Few” while others fall by the wayside, it’s time to look back at how we got here. Nothing unites Europeans like football, and this year’s Euro 2008 tournament is turning out to be one of the best in a long time, maybe ever. [...]

Early results from the Irish referendum suggest that it’ll be time to go back to the drawing board. Hm.
Update: Comments in P’s thread.

Henry of Crooked Timber, whom I know from way back, is in Ireland and has written up how the country’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty looks the day before voting. There’s also a more academic version, for those inclined.
I hope that it will be a moot point, but I’m curious about how things would work [...]

Boy, this will certainly help ease dependence on oil.

Perhaps not “While Europe Slept”, but can we have a little more attention to what’s going on in Italy? As well as the fascist saluting business, and the is-he-joking-is-he-serious threats of violence, we’re seeing gypsy camps being set on fire by thugs, whose behaviour is being excused by the Northern League on grounds that the [...]

Over at the German-speaking version of ScienceBlogs, they’re talking about a referendum (and nobody’s going to sing a song with that as the refrain), or rather a whole package of them. Switzerland famously has a lot of referendums, but this one is interesting because it points up the fundamental tension between democracy and the republic.
So [...]