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BY KEITH NUTHALL
A NEW report from the European Environment Agency has described the wide gulf between Member States’ performance on renewable energy generation and highlighted a number of reasons for this. The top performer for 1993-9 was Germany, which surged ahead with the development of photovoltaics, solar thermal installations and wind generated energy output.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
EUROPEAN Union internal market ministers have reached a “political agreement” to ban the use of azocolourants in the dyeing of a range of textile and leather goods. Azocolourants are dyes made from nitrogen-based compounds, which could cause cancer.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FATHER Christmas would have been appalled; European Commission officials have been censured for enjoying the hospitality of a Russian game exporter, which they subsequently granted permission to send reindeer meat to the European Union.

Jacob Söderman, the European Ombudsman has played Santa, ruling that these Eurocrats compromised themselves during a fact-finding mission to Russia, by allowing Sweden-based company Norrfrys Ab to lay on lunch, hotel and flight reservations, temporary fax facilities, interpretation services and inspection cars.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Space Agency has established a data link between satellites using a laser beam to carry signals, the first time this has been achieved. The SILEX system on ESA’s Artemis satellite was able to receive images in real time from the French space agency CNES’s Earth observation satellite SPOT 4, relaying them to an image processing center in Toulouse.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AMERICAN online book retailers are likely to be upset by the decision of the European Union Council of Ministers (finance) to approve its proposed new VAT requirement for books downloaded from the Internet. The system allows for online EU exporters to sell their goods without charging sales tax, but penalises websites based in the United States, (or other third countries), selling to consumers in the EU.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THREE British projects have won grants from the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work for accident prevention schemes designed for small and medium-sized enterprises. The agency announced grants equivalent to pounds 2.7 million in total to 51 projects across the 15 EU countries.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE POSSIBILITY of a major increase in shipping between the European Union and Iran is being furthered by preparations to strike a trade and co-operation agreement between the two sides. Following preliminary discussions with Iranian diplomats, the European Commission has drawn up negotiating directives for such talks, which are expected to be approved by ministers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union ministers have been asked to approve the transfer of Euro 60 million from the general EU 2001 budget, (most of which is currently earmarked for fishery support), to help finance the UN’s Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in developing countries.…

From Alan Osborn
The European Commission in Brussels today (Thursday) announced

plans to replace 20 per cent of present EU consumption of diesel and

petroleum fuels in the transport sector by alternative fuels by the year

2020. It said there were three possibilities: biofuels, which were already

available, natural gas in the medium term and hydrogen and fuel cells in

the long term.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FRANCE has been added to a European Commission blacklist of Member States who have concluded so-called ‘Open Skies’ agreements with the United States, which grants relevant national airlines additional landing writes in America. Brussels opposes the deals, because they discriminate against carriers from EU countries which have not made similar agreements and also because they help US airlines compete with those based in Europe: the deals allow planes to fly onto a third country, a mixed blessing for EU carriers flying to the US, given its size.…