Blogs : 17th September (en,fr)

Trying to Rhyme with Orange. Doug Merrill, A Fistful of Euros (en)
RSS for PSI: how to promote and freely re-use public information ? en.europa-eu-audience (en,fr)
Tracking: European parliament elections 2009 (XIII). Julien Frisch, Watching Europe (en)
Lib Dems (UK) - another U-turn on Europe? Open Europe Blog (en)

All Hail Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary! Martin, Irony Too (en)
"... "I can only play the hand I was dealt" stated Paulson referring to seventy odd years where government backed mortgages were effectively forgotten in the national debt figures ..."

The post-invasion bump. Certain Ideas of Europe (en)
" ... The leaders' popularity list, compiled here from a variety of polling sources, shows the Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev with higher approval ratings than his counterparts in most of the world's big countries. He has a whopping +47 rating ..."

Reality is a bitter pill to take. EUReferendum (en)
" ... illustrating the bizarre convolutions of the EU as it tries – and fails – to implement one of its policies ... More specifically, it is about the latest twist in the EU’s emission trading scheme (ETS) ... In the last piece we did on the subject, we pointed out that the electricity generation industry was a prime candidate for the ETS treatment – generation cannot be moved offshore and the captive customer base cannot buy its electricity elsewhere. Whatever costs are loaded onto the product, the (domestic) customer has to grin and bear it ...
... So it is that the commission is ducking the obvious and necessary decision – that, in order to avoid the wholesale loss of industry, it is going to have to back off from its grandiose scheme to save the planet. If it does back off, though, the EU is not going to meet its self-imposed emission reduction targets. Perhaps more to the point, it is going to lose leverage when it tries to bully other countries into joining its economic suicide pact."

Oui, Je Parle English. Eurosoc3, EuroSoc (en)
" ... The UK officially joined the EEC now known as the European Union in 1973. At the time there were nine member states. When George Thomson, one of the first of two commissioners sat down with his counterparts in Brussels at an initial meeting, one of his fellow commissioners said: “Now you will have to learn nine languages”.
Thomson replied: “No. You will have to speak English”. ..."