european parliament
Guys in black and no ties
Dilemma. The sartorial angst of the eurocrat-turned-web-dude can become a major preoccupation, especially when facing a new oh-so-cool peer group in public. Damn! I haven’t a thing to wear…
European Parliament “Question time” – can it deliver?
Many people are hoping that question time at 3 pm this afternoon will deliver a lively and memorable debate when Members bowl questions at Commission President José Manuel Barroso. To move things along and prevent waffle they are limited to 1 minute – for the question and response. Questions on any subject will come from [...]
Make your step on an unknown path
A few days ago I was discussing with my colleagues about how and why we came to Brussels. I filled in my application for auxiliary agent (temporary limited employment) the very last evening before the deadline. I found it by accident on some Czech government page. Few weeks later I received a phone call from [...]
The day the system broke down
This week started with a huge system failure. The first thing we noticed was that “Outlook” was not responding anymore. It left – for half a day as we discovered later – with no mention of when it would come back, and we couldn’t write e-mails to each other anymore. It became a day of [...]
A blogging guru visits
It was truly fascinating to meet – in the flesh!!! – euro uber-blogger Julien Frisch this week when he paid a visit to our humble faceless office block. Rarely-seen editors emerged blinking into the light to proffer a hand, impressionable young web-editors jostled for a sighting of a local myth, glamourous young ladies solemnly vowed not [...]
Britney and the top five
A while ago, in February to be precise, I wrote a post entitled “Sex, porn and Britney Spears”, at the end of which I wondered “whether an article titled and tagged as this one is, especially when these terms appear in tempting conjunction with “European Parliament”, gets any bump in traffic?”. Well, I went and checked.
We are all history-makers
I was thankful when someone once told me that “when you surround yourself with people who never want to advance in life, you will be exactly like them”. “You have to surround yourself with people who have a plan in life, in other words with people who are “a life”, because when one has no [...]
New technologies: Keeping up without being killed in the attempt
Today is a big day in the life of the ep-webeditors blog. Nay, a rite of passage, a coming of age, an arrival in the sunlit uplands of Parliament bloggerdom. Today, our big boss, Jaume, Director and EP official spokesman, no less, appears for the first time on this blog. What’s more, he wants to talk about us!
Squeezing just a bit more toothpaste out of the tube
Hardened followers of Parliament’s website may notice some differences about how the news pages cover the plenary session this week…
Big worlds and small worlds
This is probably exactly the wrong place, indeed a self-contradictory place, to hint at heretically relativising thoughts, but being away far from Brussels for a few weeks has made me reflect on digital divides of various sorts.
Friends from work
The European Parliament is probably an institution with the biggest numbers of friendships at work. Why? One would say there is no other choice. Other would say there is a very clear choice. At one point Belgians and other friends appeared but lion’s share of my friends were still about to pass by in my work [...]
The history of the world is the world’s court of justice – Friedrich Von Schiller
Moscow and Warsaw have been trading verbal blows over the circumstances of the outbreak of WW II – the opening of which began 70 years ago this week. To anyone who follows the European Parliament it seems that historical disputes are never far from the surface. The arrival of countries from central and Eastern Europe [...]
May and June most read stories.
Our (recently established) monthly edition of sharing with your our monthly most read stories has suffered from too much work (between May and the Election) but also from too much rest (as I flew away as soon as the last ballot was counted). In order not to let the late posts piling up on my [...]
I take it all back…
Well, some of it anyway… Hardly had I pressed the “publish” button on the last post than the Parliament provided its big surprise of the week.
About cycling and fulfilling election promises
Fishing for public attention is the daily business of politicians; therefore it is always a pleasure to witness some original and positive ideas in this respect. One such election project was a Czech MEPs idea to cycle from Prague to Strasbourg and to announce it as [...]
Gossip and the joy of politics
The fight for positions and influence has been tough, the deals which result in the outcomes to be formalised this week come after tough negotiations and sometimes bitter fights. There are winners and losers. Some are in, others are out. For the well-informed observer, the process is a fascinating one. Yes, it’s even fun to watch.
How green do we go?
Call it post-election annihilation. Or maybe we were too concentrated to catch the new MEPs in the corridors to be able to notice anything else. The fact is, the ‘Green week’ of the European Parliament passed relatively unnoticed, if it was not for a Green official that made me test the ecopassenger tool, a very [...]
Still no equal representation in Parliament
Next week the newly elected MEPs will flock to Strasbourg for the inaugural session of the Parliament. Among them approximately 35% female Members. A slight increase compared to the previous legislature (until recently Parliament had 31% female MEPs) but way too little to be able to speak of an equal representation, after all 52% of EU’s [...]
User-generated cyber-trash
There’s a grey zone of cyberspace cluttered with petabytes of irrelevant publicly available private content. Is social media making us waste time and in reality become anti-social?
Post elections… we need more training or not?
Now that the elections are over, it is amazing to see the peacefulness which has been installed in our corridors…schedules are getting lighter that they already fit in one page, people are already emancipating about going on holidays, many have already flown away…therefore I decided to go for a training – teamwork.
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