Those horrible surveillance proposals came up again in the European Parliament, and got shot down again. Even though their co-author Syed Kamall did come out against some forms of mass surveillance, I promised I’d look into the two British Conservative MEPs who keep doing this. Anyway, so we’ve got Syed Kamall and Malcolm Harbour, and [...]

A handy chart in English from Dutch business newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Clickable map covers the EU-27 and includes debt, growth, unemployment, budget deficit and latest credit outlook.

Well, will you look at this? Remember Tory MEP Syed Kamall, who was the author of a proposal to implement total Internet surveillance in the EU, in order to make the French record industry happy? (I’m sorry to say I spelt his name wrong.) We beat that one. But now look at him - [...]

Over at English Russia, Sergei Larenkov has merged historic photos form the siege of Leningrad with contemporary pictures taken from the same vantage point. Flak balloons, protective scaffolding, ruins and dead bodies juxtaposed with SUVs, modern busses, restored facades. Fascinating work.
Don’t miss his links to other photo projects down at the bottom of the post. [...]

The administration here isn’t changing, but we are doing a little cleaning up. At the moment, it’s confined to the blogroll. First, I’ll be pruning the blogs that have gone on hiatus. Then, probably some time next week, we will add new ones. We always want to hear about good blogs writing about Europe, but [...]

On the topic of European innovation, this demo application from the Nokia Forum rocks. Basically, it uses the Sensor API in the latest version of Symbian S60 and the phone camera to detect what you’re pointing the cam at, and show information related to it.
Tagging Barcelona
Naturally this information could be sucked in from the Web, [...]

A sad and undignified tale from LeWeb3; it’s chilly and the conference WLAN doesn’t work, so a whole gaggle of US microsleb gadgetbloggers staged a queeny flounce. And, of course, it’s all more evidence of the eventual demise of Europe. Isn’t it always? Not so long ago, we were apparently faced with the French civil [...]

Last week, some US-based bloggers were talking about their dissatisfaction with the term, “soft power.”
Matthew Yglesias:
[C]an we retire the term “soft power” already? I always feel that it’s been popularized not so much by Professor Nye as by deranged warmongers who like the idea of terming every alternative to militarism as somehow “soft,” fluffy, [...]

Two productivity-enhancing additions to the internet that at least a couple of our readers may not have noticed in the last 24 hours.
Google is putting the image archive of the American magazine LIFE online. Over the next few months, this will mean access to some 10 million images, the vast majority of them never published. [...]

London gets a visit from AFOE founder David Weman. Here’s a photo of him and fellow long-time fistfulist Matthew Turner, at the Prince of Wales, Highgate.
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