Ireland’s taoiseach (and current EU head) Bertie Ahern expresses sympathy for Germany’s position on voting under the proposed EU constitution, reports EUobserver.
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Doctors and pilots stage a one-day strike in Italy. (BBC) If you’re flying Alitalia in for that emergency appendectomy, try to hold on till tomorrow.
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Russian Presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin has gone missing. Police are now looking for him and he has not been seen since Thursday
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The EU’s Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen is confident a deal can be struck to reunite Cyprus before it joins the EU on May 1st
David Hasselhoff, the Great Liberator?
Daniel Drezner is amused at the American television actor David Hasselhoff. Hasselhoff, it seems, is annoyed that he is not given the credit he so clearly deserves for the fall of the Iron Curtain (no, really). But some of Mr Drezner’s commenters feel that Hasselhoff might have a bit of a point.
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Palestinian Authority foreign minister Nabil Shaath sees Joschka Fischer’s suggestion of an EU/Near East free trade zone, and raises it. Speaking at the Munich security conference, Shaath suggested that an independent Palestine, after concluding peace with Israel, should join the European Union. (Der Spiegel; in German.)
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Get your hands on a real fistful of Euros – Europe’s first transnational lottery starts selling tickets today in Britain, France and Spain
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Gerhard Schr?der has resigned the chairmanship of the SPD, handing the reins to Franz M?ntefering (Der Spiegel; link in German). The latter is regarded as to the left of Schr?der (though much less so than Oskar Lafontaine), not to say more popular with the party base.
A Not Very Gloomy Post?
David has been suggesting that I might be a gloomy person, so I’d like to try and kill that idea stone dead, and quick as a flash, with an extraordinarily optimistic post about a key EU topic: Turkey.
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