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Archive for the 'Europe' Category
Monaco: The changing size of a country
The “Principality of Monaco” the second smallest state in the world, is continuously demonstrating for the last 100 years how to gain in size without being able to expand into neighboring countries…What the two maps above don’t show is the substantial expansion with the new harbor in recent years as part of a new orientation of Monaco towards a broader spectrum of tourism (see for example this “official press release”). Other countries in Europe that have substantially expanded their terrain in a similar way are…
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Europe: European Innovation Scoreboard 2006 published
The European Innovation Scoreboard measures the innovation performance of a country’s economy based on a wide range of 25 indicators, from education to expenditure in Information and Communication Technologies, investment in R&D or number of patents. Countries with a more homogeneous behavior in all aspects of innovation tend to achieve higher overall scores.
“…For the fourth consecutive year, the innovation gap between the US and the EU has decreased. The Nordic countries and Switzerland continue to be the innovation leaders worldwide, while many of the new Member States are steadily catching up with the EU average. These are some of the main findings of the European Innovation Scoreboard 2006, published today. The report presents a comparative analysis of the innovation performance of European countries, the US and Japan…
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UK women are now officially the fattest in Europe
Based on the authoritative Eurostat yearbook British women are now leading the chart of obesity of the EU’s 27 member countries. Measured by the Body Mass Index that calculates a height to weight ratio - people are classified as obese if they weigh a fifth more than their ideal maximum weight. A quarter of women and a fifth of men in the UK are now so overweight that their health is at serious risk. The EU statisticians looked only at adult obesity, but previous studies have shown…
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UK: Government planning to become Peeping Tom
According to UK daily newspaper “The Sun” the UK Home office is currently planning to put x-ray like devices that could snap “naked” pictures of passers-by into lampposts or otherwise cover public space. While the idea here - as usual - is to trap terror suspects and identify people carrying weapons or explosives, it is unclear how controls or accountability for the use of such systems can be implemented. Officials claim one solution would be to allow only women to monitor female subjects. How this can be done on a public square sounds rather optimistic to us. People living in the UK are today already on average captured 300 times per day by more than 4 million surveillance cameras…
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Germany: Rent a Demonstrator for your Political Protest
If your shouting days are through – Fred Kasulzke shouts for you! That’s how German/French songwriter and singer “Reinhard Mey” was singing in the 70s about the business idea of renting people for demonstrations and riots. Seemingly these days “claqueurs” are getting popular again in Germany particularly with the bureaucrats and stakeholders in the state backed German health system…
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UK: (Small) Tornado hits North London
While there are about 50 small Tornadoes reported on land in the UK each year - the most of all countries in Europe - this one due to the damages created is quite unusual. Within less then a minute that the tornado lasted it severely damaged more then 100 houses and injured a series of [...]
Guerilla Advertising: Vote before crossing the street
As seen in London at some pedestrian crossings…
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Russia: Activities of more then 90 NGOs suspended
Yesterday Russia has suspended the activities of more the 90 foreign non government organizations (NGOs) including Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and Human Rights Watch, saying they failed new registration requirements recently introduced with a controversial law.
The law that was signed by President Putin earlier this year allows authorities to ban financing of specific [...]
Yes Minister: EC Vice-President speaks up against administration
Many of us do know it and all of the EC commissioners know it. But until yesterday no high ranking official has ever publicly admitted it.
In an interview (in German) with German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Guenter Verheugen, Vice-President of the European Commission said that, over the years, the power of high ranking civil servants [...]
