After having asked myself what libraries are for in my previous post, now the political bit – what can the EU do for libraries? Or what should it do? Ilona Kish from the Public Libraries 2020 programme in Brussels ran a workshop about funding opportunities for libraries here at Next […]
Straightforward honesty, clear ethics, transparency of motives and behaviour, and an ability to acknowledge when one is wrong, are personal values I personally hold dear, and they are – I would argue – values that the general public would like to also see from their politicians. The problem is, as […]
Today has been my first day at Next Library, a two day conference about libraries and their future that’s taking place at the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek in Kreuzberg in Berlin. While I am super happy to be able to go to something that’s barely five minutes on foot from where I live, […]
Prior to the 2014 European Parliament elections I examined all the runners and riders for President of the European Commission and other EU top jobs (2014 posts on President of the Commission: EPP, PES, Others | President of the European Council | High Rep for EU Foreign Policy). Now, with […]
So 84% of Europeans want to stop changing the clocks in spring and autumn. And 3.79% of the German population participated in a European Commission consultation. A summary of the details can be found here. So stop changing the clocks then! Hang on, not so fast. The question then is […]
Anyone who has followed this blog over the years knows that I not only write about EU politics here, but live it, and try to shape it in any way I can, pretty much every day. Trying to change the EU through party politics has been a part of that. […]
Back almost five years ago I spent a week live blogging from Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise ship in the English Channel – you can find all my posts from that trip here. Now I am writing this on my way to another live blogging trip – I am going to Charleroi […]
Tomorrow – Wednesday 7th February – the plenary of the European Parliament votes on a proposal from the Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) committee about the rules for the 2019 European Parliament elections, now just 16 months away in May 2019. What makes this matter controversial this time is the issue […]
In my major post about Joseph Mifsud I put “professor” in inverted commas. That was before I knew the extent of Mr Mifsud’s activities, but now having looked into it, it seems to me that this Professor title Mifsud has been using is highly questionable. To be clear from the […]
The world has been asking themselves who the “mystery professor” Joseph Mifsud is. The British press – Byline and Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian – have been connecting Mifsud to Alok Sharma and Boris Johnson. Mifsud has good Russian connections and is supposed to be the person who facilitated the […]
The original blog post became so complicated and unwieldy that it has all now been re-organised, although the content is essentially the same. tl;dr: Joseph Mifsud is at the heart of a network of questionable political, business and academic practices, some of which are connected to Russia. The connections between […]
Every one in a while a Brussels media outlet or public affairs firm tries to show they are digital-aware by publishing a kind of league table of something to do with social media in the EU bubble. Yesterday it was Euractiv and ZN’s turn – they held an event called […]