Sunday, June 29, 2008

Bill Gates (Microsoft Chairman) Stepped Away

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Microsoft experienced a ritual (on June 27) that is common to offices across America: a valued employee's last day. Co-workers paused to gather around their departing colleague, speeches were made and perhaps some cake was consumed.

But this employee isn't just any staff member; he is Bill Gates. Although he will remain chairman, his day-to-day role with the company is over. How do you sum up 33 years spent building the world's largest software company? What accomplishments do you highlight? What topics are best avoided for the sake of politeness?

In Gates's case, sometimes it's hard to tell. …To read more at Washington Post
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Sunday, June 22, 2008

Accusation of Blackmailing over the EU Lisbon Treaty

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Nicolas Sarkozy has been accused of putting the brakes on European Union expansion in a desperate attempt to salvage the Lisbon Treaty.

Excerpts - The French president, who came up with the idea of the Treaty, a watered-down version of the rejected EU constitution, said: "It is certain that as long as we have not solved the institutional problem, the question of enlargement is stopped de jure or de facto."

A Tory Euro-MP and his party’s spokesman on foreign affairs in the European Parliament, said: "This is just blackmail on the Irish and everyone else who wants enlargement. He wants to put pressure on the Irish, to make them feel guilty and to push them into a second vote.” ...Telegraph UK

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Sunday, June 15, 2008

EU Lisbon Treaty -- Changes After the Irish “No”

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called Ireland's "no" to the EU's Lisbon treaty a call to change the way Europe was being constructed. But he has also urged other states to continue the ratification process.

"Many Europeans do not understand how we are constructing Europe. We must therefore change the way we do it," Sarkozy told journalists in Paris after meeting US President George W. Bush.

The Irish rejection of the treaty was "an appeal to do more, to do it better," he said. But Sarkozy, whose country is taking over the rotating presidency in July, stressed that no one had the right to sabotage the European project. One of the treaty's aims is to streamline decision-making processes in the enlarged and more unwieldy 27-member bloc… Deutsche Welle
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Thursday, June 5, 2008

Obama's Successful Run and the Timing Aspects


Presidential candidates often prevail because they happen to arrive just as the country is ready to receive them. Sen. Barack Obama is such a candidate.

Sen. Obama, who now has secured the support needed to be the Democratic nominee, is an unconventional presidential contender, almost a revolutionary one. He also is a candidate who simply never could have been nominated before 2008. It was his luck, or his fate, to arrive just as a whole series of forces coalesced to afford him the chance to make history:

- Without the war in Iraq, there would have been no way to make his early mark - the one that first allowed him to distinguish himself from prohibitive favorite Sen. Hillary Clinton - by being the earliest and purest opponent of an increasingly unpopular conflict.

- Without the full flowering of the Internet, there would have been no way for him to marshal the financial wherewithal of almost 1.5 million citizens, who collectively made him the richest candidate in the race by far and turned the history of campaign fund raising on its head.

- Without the arrival of today's generation of new, young voters, who see a biracial candidate as nothing particularly out of the ordinary in the America they have grown up knowing, there wouldn't have been the same kind of historic outpouring of registrations and votes from newly minted Democrats under the age of 30. […] By GERALD F. SEIB, The Wall Street Journal