Search Results for: Portugal

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A COMPROMISE deal has been struck in Brussels over a transitional regime for the European Union sugar industry, which will last until July 2006, when a comprehensive review is expected to have taken place.

The European Commission had been pressing to deep cuts in market supports, but these have been resisted by some Member States, who are represented on the EU Council of Ministers, which approved the final agreement.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRUSSELS is always looking for big ideas by which it can justify its existence to a doubting public and one of the latest of these is the concept of a European Research Area. This idea is that Europe – with its patchwork of nations and national research units – should coordinate its academics and researchers, making sure that they do not duplicate their efforts, rather dovetailing them with a single European goal in mind.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is distributing 1.2 million leaflets this summer, which aims to educate holiday-makers on how to use the single European currency, the Euro, whose notes and coins will be launched in January.

Called “Don’t forget to Pack the Euro,” the leaflet encourages tourists to get used to the concept of the Euro whilst vacationing abroad this summer.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CRIMINALS are still fleecing the European Union’s budget of hundreds-of-millions of Euro, according to the latest European Commission fraud report. But Brussels is refusing to throw in the towel, unveiling more anti-fraud proposals, Keith Nuthall reports.

THE ANNUAL report on the Protection of the Communities’ (EU’s) Financial Interests and the Fight Against Fraud always seems to have been misnamed, in that it usually focuses on how much money the European Union has been losing to fraudsters, rather than saving.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ENVIRONMENTAL statistics are usually harbingers of bad news, so it is refreshing to hear of some positive numbers in the field via the EU’s statistical agency Eurostat’s recent report ‘gaining better knowledge of the pressures on our environment.’…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has tried to make up for its failure to strike fishing access deal with Morocco by forging an improved agreement with its north African neighbour Mauritania which Brussels claims its “the most important with a third country” that it has made.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
LOCAL authorities in the European Union are unprepared for the introduction of single European currency notes and coins next January, even though they have a crucial role in spreading information among small businesses and community groups, the European Commission has claimed.…

Keith Nuthall
ALTHOUGH petrol and diesel consumption rose by 45 per cent in the European Union between 1985 and 1998, technological improvements meant pollution by emissions such as nitrogen oxide actually fell during this time, a study from Eurostat, the EU statistical agency has claimed.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE CASE brought by the European Commission against the Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds corporations for their alleged involvement in cigarette smuggling has opened at the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The Commission has now been formally joined in the case by Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg, who have given mandate Commission lawyers to represent them.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE REVIEW of the Common Fisheries Policy is likely to create the largest overhaul in European Union fishing policy in years, matching the crisis in stock levels in European waters. At its heart is the integration of environmental and conservation concerns into the organisation of the EU fishing market, a principle that – judging by conclusions agreed by the Council of Ministers – will have significant consequences when changes are put in place next year.…