Today marks the first anniversary of A Few Euros More*. While I don’t think it’s reached its full potential, it turned into a pretty good blog, and I think it was well worth the effort.
*You might have noticed that the archives go back much longer. Quicklinks, a sidebar semi-blog, was hardly the same blog as afem however.
Just a short and light post pointing you to this article on the BBC News site in which Stephen Mulvey talks about how the EU is trying to seduce its voters and why that is necessary:
Europe has been searching for years for something to inspire a new generation of citizens – a generation unimpressed by 60 years of peace and the ending of the continents’ Cold War divisions.
The piece itself is well worth a read, but what I really liked were the European jokes in the comments to the article. One example, from commenter Robert Fromow:
A prize was to be awarded for the first person to discover a horse with black and white stripes like a zebra. A German, a Frenchman, an Englishman and a Spaniard participated hoping to win the prize of 1,000,000 euros. The German decided to spend weeks in the National library researching into horses with black and white stripes. The Englishman went straight to a shop in Piccadilly which specialises in hunting gear, bought all the equipment necessary and set off for Africa in his quest for this strange creature. The Frenchman bought himself a horse and painted it black and white . The Spaniard went to the best restaurant he knew in Madrid, ordered an expensive meal for himself with a fine bottle of wine; after the meal he ordered an expensive Havana cigar and a Napoleon brandy, sat in a luxurious arm-chair in the hotel and began to consider what he would do with the 1,000,000 euros once he had found this remarkable horse with black and whte stripes. Robert Fromow, Beaconsfield UK
Go and have a laugh. And, if you know of any decent European jokes yourself, please feel free to submit them in our comments section.
The UN has elected a brand new Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission. Why was the old HRC discredited? Well, basically and officially, because several of its members were known to violate human rights and/or to protect their own interests. It is only logical. However, who will be taking a seat in the new and improved HRC? Right, some of those very same countries that were known to violate human rights: China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
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The prospect of Sarkozy replacing Villepin as French Prime Minister has apparently been given a significant boost today, with a close aide of Sarkozy saying his boss could accept such an offer, provided he is allowed to carry out his (and not Chirac’s) political agenda.
Now, maybe this won’t come to pass (and I’ll argue below that it probably won’t). But it is worth recalling some recent history to show how extraordinary such a move would be.
It is not just that Chirac had considered Sarkozy a traitor since he chose to support the presidential bid of (then Prime minister) Edouard Balladur in the presidential elections of 1995. It is also that Chirac has done everything in his power to impede Sarkozy’s rise to power since 2002. In 2004, Chirac battled behind the scenes to try to foil the takeover of his own UMP party by Sarkozy, then the popular Minister of the Interior. When that didn’t work, he ordered him to leave the government, on the theory that having the head of the main party of the parliamentary majority in the cabinet would sap the authority of the Prime Minister (conveniently forgetting that Alain Juppé, a long-time Chirac protégé, was at the same time president of the RPR and Foreign Minister from November 1994 to May 1995).
That theory did last less than a year, since Sarko was back in the government after the failed referendum on the EU constitution in late May 2005. But Chirac ignored the calls of his parliamentary majority to name Sarko Prime Minister and went for Villepin instead, with the hope of making the latter a rival to the former for the next presidential elections. Asking now Sarko to replace Villepin would then be tantamount to a declaration of surrender on Chirac’s part.
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And so it begins. Back in Italy, the Left has comprehensively disrupted the Right’s systems by folding Massimo D’Alema’s candidacy (German link) and producing a surprise candidate, the 81-year old Democratic Leftie Giorgio Napolitano. The effect has been to split the Right coalition, with ex-cause célébre Rocco Buttiglione annoucing that his neo-Christian Democrats will back Napolitano, the Northern League announcing they will oppose him, whilst Forza Italia and the ex-fascists hold their peace – perhaps for lack of a decision on what to do.
Fascinatingly, as yesterday blogged, part of the problem is managing the vote so the Democratic Left’s honour is maintained. Apparently, if it looks like Napolitano won’t make it, the Left will spoil their ballots rather than submit him to a defeat. However, the split on the Right raises another possibility: in the first three rounds of voting, a two-thirds supermajority is needed to elect a president, but if there is no agreement by then, in the fourth round only a simple majority, 504 votes, is needed. It might pay to keep the Left vote down for three rounds, then plunge for the 50%+1..
Update, 1700BST: The voting has begun. Unione candidates are apparently going to cast a blank ballot in the first round. Are they pursuing the AFOE strategy?
Bitch PhD has a long post warning bloggers of the perils of signing up with a syndication service called BlogBurst. Essentially, what BlogBurst does is take an RSS feed of your blog, then sell the feeds to big-traffic websites. Now, we can already see one thing wrong with this picture. Why would anybody pay for RSS they can aggregate completely free?
Clearly that reference to “big-traffic websites” ought to read “high-traffic but clue-deficient websites”.
Now, this might seem a good idea. More traffic please. Here’s the first problem, though; the BlogBurst feed includes the complete text of your stuff. There is no way in which any of the traffic will make its way back to you, unless you count a byline link. In fact, as one can read all your stuff (and other blogs too) on Bigsite.com, you may actually lose traffic.
BlogBurst asked us to join some time ago. After considerable consideration, we decided to turn them down. It wasn’t the traffic we were concerned about, though. It was the fact that agreeing to let BlogBurst use your stuff involves granting them a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display, disclose, and otherwise dispose of the Work (and derivative works thereof) for the purposes of (a) modifying the Work without substantially changing its original meaning, and (b) distributing the Work (and derivative works thereof) to Publisher electronic web sites or corresponding printed editions, whether now known or hereafter devised. That is to say, signing over the rights!
Needless to say, this is a very bad idea, and (although IANAL) does not seem compatible with Creative Commons licencing. Especially as BlogBurst offers in exchange the prospect that there “might” be some payment in the future. Not “will”. And, just to cap the lot, if you are independently hosted like we are, it could cost you a fortune. Any images in your posts, should they be picked up by BlogBurst, will be hotlinked – on sites that are meant to run massive numbers of pageviews.
Well, this is a little late, but we ought to put on record that the fun-lovin’ minicaudillo’s fingers were eventually pried from the Italian prime ministership. As predicted, he went out with a considerable degree of low comedy, as the Italian senate struggled to elect a speaker largely because the Berlusconi side insisted on making a fuss about whether ballots cast for the eventual winner read “Franco” or “Francesco” Marini. Eventually, though, it was done.
The Senate speakership had been the last real opportunity to cling on, as the Left has a working majority in the lower house and therefore appointed its man without trouble. The deeper play of the Senate vote, by the way, was an effort to cause trouble in the Unione’s ranks – Romano Prodi chose to put forward a Refounded Communist, Faustino Bertinotti, as speaker of the lower house, thus getting the far Left on side, and therefore needed to balance the ticket by putting someone from the ex-Christian Democrat wing of his coalition in the Senate. This being achieved, Berlusconi had no longer any excuse to hang on.
The next problem will be to elect a President. In Italy, the presidency is a nonexecutive position more like that of Germany than that of France, but the president does choose who is asked to form a government, so without a prez there can be no prime minister. Now, the simplest option would just have been to re-elect Ciampi, but he says he’s too old. This is where it gets complicated, because a super-majority is needed to elect a president.
Recalling that the Refounded Communists got the speakership of the lower house, and the ex-democristiani the speakership of the upper house (and in all probability the prime ministership). Which major faction on the left is empty-handed? That’s right, the non-refounded communists, who in fact really did refound themselves to become the Democratic Left, unlike their former comrades in the Refoundation who didn’t refound themselves and remained communist. Their leader, former PM Massimo D’Alema, was therefore put forward as a candidate for the presidency even though the chance of Berlusconi’s side supporting him was exactly nil.
In fact, the Right is threatening a campaign of mass demonstrations in the event of his election, and suggesting that Marini be the President. This, your keen and agile minds will soon perceive, is a transparent device to reopen the speakership issue and thus destabilise the Left. Alternatively, the Right proposes, the secretary of the Presidency, Gianni Letta, might be a candidate.
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Gypsies Gain a Legal Tool in Rights Fight
But now, some leaders of the Gypsies, or Roma, are looking to a new model to try to achieve equality: the civil rights struggle of black Americans. More and more, the Roma are going to court to secure their rights, and doing so where they think it will have the best chance for success — among the new East European members of the European Union and those trying to join, which are seeking to impress Western Europe with strict interpretations of their new antidiscrimination laws.
Germany and the Herero: What now? asks Ranry McDonald, guest posting on the Head Heeb.
Back on the 29th of August, The Globe of Mail of Toronto featured an article by Stephanie Nolen (“‘Forgive us our trespasses'”) that examined the contentious question of how–or even if–the Herero of Namibia should be compensated for their sufferings in the Herero Genocide of 1904-1907.