WEF Country Rankings for Growth Competitiveness 2005-2006

The World Economic Forum has released its 2005 rankings for growth competitiveness by country, noting:

"Finland remains the most competitive economy in the world and tops the rankings for the third consecutive year in The Global Competitiveness Report 2005-2006, released by the World Economic Forum. The US is in second position, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Taiwan and Singapore, respectively. "The Nordic countries share a number of characteristics that make them extremely competitive, such as very healthy macroeconomic environments and public institutions that are highly transparent and efficient," said Augusto Lopez-Claros, Chief Economist and Director of the Forum's Global Competitiveness Programme."

See the full press release.
See the full Growth Competitiveness Report 2005-2006

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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Free for 3 Days

This is a deal!

I started with the featured bio of the immensely successful novelist Barbara Hamilton Cartland, the "Queen of Romance".

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which ordinarily costs 7500 English pounds to buy, is available online for free to read for 3 days, September 23 to 25, 2005.

If you are a biography buff, as I am, this will fill your weekend. Via the Guardian News Blog.

Cross-posted to LawPundit.
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EULegal.Org Links Updated

The EULegal.Org EU European Union links have been updated to correspond with recent changes at the EU website.
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EU Pages Currently Not Accessible as Under Reconstruction

At EULegal.org I recently created a website providing quick links inter alia to the major EU institutions and their workings so that one could find one's way around the otherwise confusing, badly designed and non-intuitive official website of the European Union (EU).

The EU pages are now apparently being redone, but rather than having a sensible redirection system from the old pages and at least maintaining the most important portal pages, almost all EU website pages are currently not accessible due to their apparent reconstruction.

Rather, one gets the following errored message:

Aus technischen Gründen werden einige paginas [note that paginas is not a word in German !] auf EUROPA nicht abrufbar sein. Wir bitten Sie um Entschuldigung und danken Ihnen für Ihr Verständnis.

Due to technical reasons, some pages on EUROPA will be inaccessible. We wish to apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Pour des raisons techniques, certaines pages sur EUROPA seront inaccessibles. Nous vous prions de bien vouloir accepter nos excuses et vous remercions par avance de votre compréhension."

That message appears on a page which still contains remnants of graphics that are not loading and which then shows "error" text and the "red X" for the failing graphics.

These kinds of problems and errors should not exist at the level of the EU.

At the same time, we found some renovated website pages of the EU Parliament even though these also contain links to no longer accessible pages e.g. Europe Direct

What we did find online was:

EU Parliament Portal - language selection
EU Parliament - website modernized and updated
European Parliament - near you
European Parliament- public default
European Parliament - description

These pages are a start toward reaching state-of-the-art in website design, and we particularly like the incorporation of the EU map to find country-specific information, e.g. MEPs.

On the other hand, one must ask why the programmers do not center the materials but rather have that material squeezed into the left half of the sreen? Have they never heard of the simple HTML "center" command?
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