The sandwich protest

One of the favourite pastimes of interns in Brussels is to go ‘pluxing' on Thursday nights – outdoor drinking at Place du Luxembourg.

As they sip (or gulp) their two-for-one happy hour beers, these young, wide-eyed new arrivals to Brussels can often be heard discussing the drudgery and disillusionment of the unpaid positions they've taken on since arriving. They speak of long hours, little or no pay, and highly questionable educational value. It's no wonder they want to let off some steam come Thursday evening.

Given their fondness for the square, it's perhaps little surprise that the interns have chosen Place du Luxembourg for the location of a walk-out protest on Wednesday (17 July), demonstrating against unfair internship conditions in Brussels.

The protest, which will take place between 11h and 13h, has been dubbed the ‘Sandwich Protest'. The idea is that Brussels interns are living such a hand-to-mouth existence that the only way they can feed themselves is by scouring for free sandwiches at conferences and other events. “When did you last have something else other than a sandwich for lunch?” the organisers ask on their Facebook page.

Brussels' complicated expats

Tensions have been higher than usual in recent months between the Belgian and expat communities here in Brussels, after a series of articles by foreign journalists based here were seen as disparaging the city.

In May, a two-page spread by the Brussels correspondent for the French newspaper Libération, which called the Belgian capital 'ugly, dirty and dysfunctional', kicked off the storm. Since then, the Belgian press has seemed singularly obsessed with the outsiders' impressions. Much of the Belgian media's coverage has expressed outrage that the expat community, who have come to Brussels to work in and around the EU institutions, are so often complaining about their host city.

It was in this context that today the ‘Brussels-Europe Liaison Office' - a body which was set up by the city government to improve relations between expats and the natives - finally released the long-awaited results of its expat survey. The survey, which was conducted in May of last year with about 10,000 respondents, was meant to have results published last September. The year-long delay had sparked speculation that the results were being suppressed because the responses from expats were just too rude. Given that the liaison office has the job of improving relations, it would have been rather embarrassing to publish a survey where the expat population vented their dissatisfaction.

Much ado about colouring

The Brits are in a tizzy over an EU childrens book. But their own Parliament has produced four of them.

At the last EU summit, it was olive oil. At this summit, the burning issue that UK prime minister David Cameron wanted to discuss at his post-summit press conference was even more insidious – an EU-funded colouring book.

The multilingual children's exercise book produced by the European Parliament, first reported by the Telegraph earlier this week, is called ‘Mr and Mrs MEP and their helpers'. It contains exercises centred around a day in the life of two MEPs. Cameron distributed 30 copies of the children's book to the other EU leaders at the summit, saying something had to be done to reign in this reckless EU spending.

"[The other leaders] were shocked,” he told journalists after the summit. “First of all they thought it was a hoax done by the Telegraph and I had to convince them that it was a genuine, scandalous waste of money, and pretty sexist at that as well, because Mrs MEP stops at six o clock to go shopping and Mr MEP goes on until 6:40."

The colouring book is, admittedly, pretty awful. Its layout more closely resembles an IKEA manual than children's exercises, and its depiction of Parliamentary life makes it easy fodder for mockery.

US snooping, seen through a European PRISM

There are few things that can unite the quarrelling factions of the European Parliament, but somehow US President Barack Obama managed to accomplish it this morning. One by one, MEPs from various political factions denounced in the strongest terms the recent revelations of US government access to user activity data from internet giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft – a programme that went under the codename PRISM.

Interestingly, it was the assurances the US President gave to the American people this weekend that seemed to infuriate the European lawmakers the most. The PRISM programme “does not apply to US citizens and it does not apply to people living the United States,” he told a press conference on 7 June. 

These words may have reassured many Americans, but they have put America's allies in an awkward position. Sites like Google and Facebook are global, after all, and widely used in Europe. If they aren't spying on Americans' internet use, then that means they are spying on people in other countries - including allies in Europe.

“What is coming from other side of the Atlantic is very worrying because they are justifying this system by saying it is not applicable to US citizens, only to foreigners,” Belgian Liberal MEP Guy Verhofstadt said in Strasbourg this morning. “Who are the foreigners? I think we are the foreigners, the Europeans.”

A week of border concerns

I'm on a train to Strasbourg for this week's plenary session of the European Parliament, for what promises to be a week largely focused on borders and travel. The fact that my train via Luxembourg has been plagued with delays seems appropriate given the travel/border legislation which is coming up this week.

On Wednesday MEPs will vote on two legislative packages seeking to change the EU rules on asylum seekers and Schengen area of passport-free travel. Both of these pieces of legislation were put forward in the early days of the Arab Spring, when a sudden influx of refugees from North Africa cast doubt on the EU's existing rules.

Border states like Italy, Greece and Malta said the existing rules, in which member states can return asylum-seekers to the EU country they first entered, complained that the existing system was unfair. 

Among other things, the new rules will put in place a monitoring system for any sudden influx of migrants and allow a suspension of the rules.

A storm in an olive cup

Yesterday, the European Commission announced a rather unusual U-turn on a new regulation that would have banned restaurants from serving olive oil in refillable bottles. The cave-in came after a week of media pressure that even saw the leaders of Britain and Holland weighing in on the subject at Wednesday's European Council.

The law was set to quietly enter into effect at the start of next year, and would have mandated that any olive oil served at a restaurant table be in labelled, pre-packaged bottles with a tamper-proof dispensing nozzle. It was approved by a recent vote of EU member states, with 15 out of 27 countries approving it.

This is probably a case of a kernel of a good intention morphing into a monster PR disaster. At heart this was supposed to be a labelling regulation – making sure that restaurant owners don't buy expensive bottles of labelled olive oil and then refill them with cheaper varieties once they are empty.

But it ended up covering all containers, even unlabelled glass bottles. This made less sense, given that a consumer can't be tricked by a misleading label if no label is present.