Mark Vanderbeeken

@vanderbeeken.app.leafplaza.eu

292 Followers 238 Following

International customer insight, market research and digital innovation expert. And some more. vanderbeeken.eu All posts are personal.

Polls suggest Italians are far more open to domestic nuclear power production than in the past. A June YouTrend poll found that 57 per cent of respondents were positive about Meloni’s attempted nuclear revival, while 31 per cent viewed it negatively. For all the current enthusiasm, Newcleo’s Buono says public support could waver when it comes to finding future sites for a new generation of small reactors. Members of Meloni’s coalition admit that another referendum cannot be ruled out either. “Italians don’t like any power installation — wind turbines, solar power plants or nuclear reactors,” Buono said. When it comes to it, “we will be having the same problems as everyone else”. Financial Times, 2 August 2006
Social media footer of ec.europa.eu
In February, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz advocated the end of online anonymity. “I want to see real names on the Internet. I want to know who is speaking,” he said at a Christian Democratic Union event in February. Merz’s proposal—deeply at odds with the Enlightenment tradition embodied by Spinoza, Voltaire, and Locke, all of whom relied on anonymous publication to defy censorship—would enable even greater speech restrictions than Germany already imposes.
This is a huge escalation. For the first time ever the US started sanctioning former senior EU officials, namely former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. If anyone doubted there was a Euro-US split going on, this is yet another hostile action by the US that makes it loud and clear. The official reason is, as expected, completely Orwellian. They sanction Breton because of his involvement in the Digital Services Act (DSA), which they claim was "extraterritorial legislation" even though it was designed to regulate content on European soil, viewed by European users. You can perfectly disagree with the DSA for plenty of reasons. But the fact is that it was policing content shown in Europe to Europeans (wherever the content may have come from). What the Americans are doing here however - sanctioning former EU officials for drafting EU legislation in Europe aimed at Europeans - is textbook extraterritoriality. Hence the "Orwellian" nature of this move by the US: accusing others of precisely what you're doing yourself. Americans say this is all about "free speech", a narrative which a frightening amount of people seem to believe. When the truth is the exact opposite: this move is about ensuring American tech platforms remain the unchallenged gatekeepers of Europe's information space, free from any oversight by Europeans themselves. And, case in point, the very fact that so many people believe this "free speech" narrative is proof in and of itself of just how effective these platforms are at shaping narratives. For the record I'm not arguing in the least that the DSA was a good piece of legislation or that Thierry Breton is some sort of tragic hero here. What I am arguing in favor of, as I consistently do, is sovereignty. I heavily dislike the EU in its present form precisely because they systematically kowtow to the US at the expense of European interests. That's a logical error I see way too many people make: they hate the EU for the same reasons I do and the…
Insiders say that in recent weeks the Americans have put incredible pressure on European government leaders to ensure that they do not touch Russian assets at Euroclear – not even as collateral for loans to Ukraine. Although the Europeans have started exploring the Euroclear route because Trump pulled the financial rug out from under Ukraine and they now have to take care of Ukraine's maintenance on their own, the Americans resorted to crude threats to dissuade them. Washington would push countries that have money at Euroclear (from Hungary to BRICS countries such as Saudi Arabia and Brazil) to withdraw it and even to stop using the euro as a reserve currency. The exodus from Euroclear is already underway. Washington also threatened to cut off European countries and companies from American clouds, satellite systems or access to Wall Street. Some EU countries, which saw no merit in the plan, were fine with the Americans taking such a hard line. But the fact remains: these are blatant extortion tactics by an ally that has ensured security in Europe for eighty years. Now it is throwing Europe under the bus. Compared to this, the Greek crisis was child's play.
European news sites on social media (8 countries, 56 selected media)
The social media accounts of European media (numbers of 9 countries) are utterly dominated by X and Instagram. Mastodon and Bluesky barely count. (in 1000 of followers)
De Standaard. Kallas. Israel. Gaza.