Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg is to be stripped of his executive power to veto laws passed by parliament after threatening to block a Bill to allow Euthanasia in the tiny state a week ago. The hereditary sovereign, 53, who is the last Grand Duke in the world, caused a constitutional crisis when he gave notice that he objected to Luxembourg following its neighbors Belgium and the Netherlands in permitting euthanasia before a second-reading vote in the Chamber of Deputies next week.

The Prime Minister, Jean-Claude Juncker will propose a change to the constitution to downgrade the role of the Grand Duke to promulgating laws with his signature rather than approving them, giving him a purely ceremonial duty in line with the other European constitutional monarchies.

Grand Duke Henri’s ethical stance on euthanasia caused the worst constitutional crisis in Luxembourg since Grand Duchess Marie-Adelaide was forced to abdicate in 1919 for being too pro-German during the First World War.

The first reading of the euthanasia Bill was approved by 30 votes to 26 in February and the intervention by the Grand Duke was seen by some as an attempt to influence the final vote.

Jean-Claude Juncker said: “I understand the Grand Duke’s problems of conscience. But I believe that if the parliament votes in a law, it must be brought into force.”

The only other time that a sovereign in Luxembourg has blocked a law was in 1912, when the Grand Duchess Marie-Adelaide refused to sign an education Bill.

UPDATE:
Pro-Life World Coming to the Defence of Luxembourg Monarch’s Stand against Euthanasia

I finally found the time to upload my pictures from the Gartner Best Practice Council end of October 2008 in Chantilly (close to Paris) on flickr.com and to embed them here.

Gartner.com organized a very nice venue and I have to say. The hotel “Chateau Mont Royal” was excellent and diner at “chez Françoise” just delicious (and this basically at a very attractive price).

I attended last week the HP IT Forum 2008 in Budapest.

Seeking for some quotes? I found quotes4all.com, iGoogle even offers an add-on to embed the quotes on your personalized entry page for Google.

On flightstats you can track flight status, airport delays and other flight and airport information. Database entries go back to early 1993.

I’m using plaxo.com to synchronize my phonebooks through all my PCs, different MACs and accounts like Google Apps. The solution,even though quite buggy a couple of years ago, works today like charme.

With the pulse stream you are even able to consolidate all your social network services within plaxo.

However I’m waiting impatiently for the announced 2-way-synchronization of my Google Account. Furthermore I never achieved to get my twitter.com implemented and hence synchronized.

Being a premium member, I made use of raising a ticket with some strange responses, the last being that everything is now working fine. Surprisingly the button to add twitter as a shared service is now completely gone. I hope people @plaxo.com are aware about this issue and will come back with a twitter solution pretty soon. If anyone does know about a workaround it would be great to see your solution posted in a comment to this article.

Update: Twitter issue seems to be solved now (04-10-2008).

Miguel Helft from New York Times about a federal judge in the U.S. forcing Google to turn over all the stored user data from youtube.com (since their founding) to viacom. Read more on New York Times.
“These very large databases of transactional information become honey pots for law enforcement or for litigants,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

Attended a training from “St. Galler Business School” in Lugano, Switzerland.

Meeting was in a niece hotel www.villacastagnola.com.

My colleague and I are on business traveling in Basel, Switzerland to visit a CMS provider, called DAY AG. You can find more information about DAY on the net: www.day.com.

We had to arrive on Sunday and visited lovely Basel in the evening.

The day after we didn’t find any hotel in Basel due to a large regional fair. My assistant made us an arrangement at the “Hotel Goldener Knopf” 20 km away from Basel in Bad Saeckingen, Germany.

Bad Saeckingen in Germany is separated from Switzerland’s village Stein by the river Rhine a lovely bridge. See below some pictures:

Well done! video of mac os x possibilities!