Search Results for: European Parliament

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE PERFORMANCE of OLAF, the European Union’s new and supposedly independent anti-fraud office, has been criticised by the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee; it has suggested that it has not worked more effectively than its predecessor UCLAF, the European Commission’s in-house fraud busting unit.…

Keith Nuthall
A NEW power-charging system for electric cars has been developed by a European Commission funded research project. The idea is to set up land-based recharging terminals at that can combine with apparatus attached to cars, leading them to be automatically recharged with electricity when they are parked.…

KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union health and safety laws should be extended by a new EU directive to cover the 90 per cent of fishing boats that are currently exempt from them, a report from Spanish socialist MEP Miguélez Ramos has claimed.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Commission president Romano Prodi has identified Britain and Spain as the governments holding up progress towards the creation of the so-called single European sky and the resulting accession of the EU to Eurocontrol. In a speech to the European Parliament on the outcome of the recent EU Stockholm summit, Mr Prodi said: “As we all know, a whole series of landmark proposals is now blocked, awaiting a bilateral agreement between Spain and the United Kingdom on Gibraltar.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EXEMPTION from European working time regulations for self-employed drivers, could last a lot longer than the three years that was agreed in the informal deal struck in the EU Council of Ministers last year.

Looking at the detail of the amended directive that has now been accepted formally by the Council, the three-year deadline only gives the European Commission the right to propose an end to the exemption.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has adopted a series of action plans to integrate the protection of biodiversity into EU agricultural, fishery, environment and development policies. Their aim is to stop losses in wildlife, ecosystems, crop varieties, domestic animals and fish.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THIRD generation mobile service providers should be encouraged to share infrastructure whilst they exploit their often expensively won licences, according to the Communication from the European Commission, called The Introduction of Third Generation Mobile Communications in the European Union: State of Play and the Way Forward.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
DIGITAL third generation mobile operators are likely to be disappointed by the result of the first EU joint telecoms-transport council, which has refused to abide by their concerns over the European Commissions new draft guidelines regarding Significant Market Power (SMP).…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Union has lifted all quotas on imports of textile and clothing products from Ukraine, in line with the agreement struck between Brussels and Kiev last December. The move follows confirmation that Ukraine has lowered its tariff levels for EU textile exports.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH the European farming industry facing more fundamental change than it has in decades, it could be said that funding research into ways of making this transformation less painless has to be a good thing. Whatever the view on this fairly facile assumption, the eyes of the agricultural sector should at least be partly turned on Brussels thus year, where debates for the preparation of a new five-year EU research programme are being staged.…