Search Results for: Portugal

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is threatening six EU Member States with legal action at the European Court of Justice for failing to implement a directive harmonising the imposition of road charges for heavy goods vehicles.

It has ordered Belgium, Germany, Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal to explain within two months how they intend to incorporate the European rules in their own legislation, or maybe face a case at the ECJ, which can order compliance and levy huge fines on governments refusing to obey.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission and European Court of Justice are shaping up for a conflict over the rights of national governments to hold golden shares in privatised utilities that given them special rights to intervene in shaping their policies, even when they do not own them.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WILL there come a day when a genuine European market in health care takes its place among the other landmark achievements of the European Union?

In terms of economic efficiency and the functioning of the internal market, does it make much sense for a million patients in Britain, say, to have to wait sometimes for a year or more for important operations while people in France or Luxembourg can book them for the next day and some German hospitals have barely half their beds filled?…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A LACK of coordination amongst EU Member States’ research teams regarding the study of BSE has been revealed by a new European inventory of previous work and that in progress, collated by the European Commission.

It has highlighted areas where better links between national research programmes is required.…

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
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.…

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.…

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
A LACK of coordination amongst EU Member States’ research teams regarding the study of BSE has been revealed by a new European inventory of previous work and that in progress, collated by the European Commission.

It has highlighted areas where better links between national research programmes is required.…