Many thanks to the good folks at AFOE for the invitation to guest-blog here for a while. To include a non-European and non-European-resident among this crowd is not a little humbling; I hope I do the blog justice. I have no handy bio available, so suffice to say that I’m an academic, I teach political [...]

Following on from threads on Calpundit and Crooked Timber, and given that Europe seems to be at the centre of the debate over religious education in schools at present, what with the French headscarf debate and the proposals to add atheism, agnosticism and humanism to RE in British schools, I thought it would be interesting [...]

Over at normblog, which is where I more usually hang out, there is a character variously known as WotN and Wife of the Norm, and who is known in her own right as Ad?le. With a name like that she could be French but isn’t, and yet I feel it’s admissible to bring her over [...]

Population changes are going to bring many cultural changes in their wake: and I’m not thinking only of immigration and multiculturalism here. Ageing populations will have different tastes and preferences, among them, apparently, will be changes in the quantity and types of alchohol consumed.
Among the explantations offered for the fact that the nation of beerdrinkers [...]

Nikolai Johannes Merrill, born this day at 12:17am, to loving parents Iris and Douglas

A beautiful new smile in this still-new century…

In Kassel the court has spoken, and its words are a stern warning to us all: do not kill and eat people (unless you are prepared to give up eight and a half years of freedom for the privilege).

Read more… or Read more [...]

Austere but elegant, and with fine views of an historic rococo church, this lovely building would make a fine weekend cottage. And you could be the lucky bidder when it comes under the hammer! There’s one thing you’ll want to have removed before settling in, though: the corpse of Franz Josef Strauss.

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Say hello to another 1,276,000 inhabitants of the EU in 2003, bringing the total to 380.8 million people on January 1st 2004. Most of them were immigrants, out of the total increase of 3.4 people for every 1000 inhabitants, 2.6 was down to net migration while only 0.8 was accounted for by natural increase (births [...]

Latest figures from Automotive Industry Data (AID) show that in 2003 diesel accounted for 44% of the West European car market, up from just over 20% ten years’ ago. In some markets, such as Austria, Belgium and France, diesel penetration is now 60% to 70%, while in Sweden it is under 8% and Greece only [...]

So there we were in the corner Italian restaurant — not staffed by Italians mind you, though maybe the cook is, but by Hungarians and Croatians — wondering why Swedish mystery writers (crime novelists, to some) are so big in Germany, and so much better than most German practitioners of the genre.
Not that we figured [...]