Europe Today

Very ambitious: Europe Today, a European newspaper not focused on EU institutions or financial issues.

The details are in their fact sheet (PDF) and I wish them good luck.

They were at least clever enough to seize the opportunity of today's European Parliament chat on the role of new media and the European Public Sphere to draw some attention to their project.

What do you think - will they succeed?

European Parliament elections 2009 (59): Spanish news ElMundo.es features EP elections

Via La Oreja de Europa ('The Ear of Europe') I just learned that the major Spanish newspaper El Mundo ('The World') features the European Union and the European Parliament elections with a special subsection of its website.

All major (and minor) newspapers in European countries should follow this example!

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Under the category "European parliament elections 2009" I am following up national and European activities on the path to the European Parliament elections 2009.

For an overview over all articles in this category have a look at the overview article.

For the five newest post see also the sidebar.

Back to butter mountains: 30,000 tons of butter will be bought by EU taxpayers

Sad news have been spread by the International Harald Tribune:

Faced with a drastic drop in the price of dairy goods, the European Union is to buy 30,000 tons of unsold butter at the taxpayers' expense - reviving one of the abiding symbols of Europe's generous farm subsidy system.

NOOOOOOO!!!!!

The banner - or: Nothing else to write about

What do you do when you are living in Brussels, being the editor of a European news magazine, and you write your editor's note:

You complain about... banners!

It seems as if there are no bigger problems in Brussels than the European Union putting up banners that inform about unimportant events. That's great.

It is not that I do not agree with the substance, but as an editor of an all-European magazine you can do much better than to find a topic that is 100% unimportant for anyone outside Brussels, a nice little city far away from reality.

But maybe this is also the reason why you write such irrelevant editor's notes...

Countries from same 'cultural area' to share EU-Commissioner?

According to an article in the German national newspaper Die Welt (which I found through the "European Union Law Blog")

"the French EU-Council presidency under the leadership of president Nicolas Sarkozy is considering to reduce the number of EU-Commissioners in such a manner that countries from "similar cultural and linguistic areas" will dispose of just one common Commissioner in Brussels."

(own translation)

As source, the newspaper is refering to "high diplomatic circles", but I haven't found any confirmation anywhere else (did you?).

The goal of this initiative, if the news is correct, seems to be to prevent lengthy disputes about how to scrap individual countries' commissioners.

In agreement with the European Union Law Blog, I doubt that this will actually avoid any lengthy discussions, especially since there will hardly be an agreement on what a 'similar cultural area' is, how many countries will be included, and from which country of each cultural area the Commissioner will come from.

Ha-ha! I can already imagine the public debates about questions such as "Skandinavia", the "Baltics", the "Germanic area", the "Roman area" (including Romania!)...

Maybe drawing lots will be less conflictual, and if the European Parliament disagrees, it can redraw until the best Commission is composed!