European Union News - 24 June 2011

The European Commission is determined to push the fight against fraud a step further. Thus, the new Strategy will cover the whole "anti-fraud cycle" with specific strategies adopted in order to cover the work of Commission's project officers, finance staff and auditors in charge of dealing with EU funds, such as Structural Funds or the European Fisheries Funds.

Researchers from the EUREKA telecommunications cluster CELTIC-Plus project '100GET are working on how advancements in delivery are needed beyond laying more optic cables to meet increasing bandwidth demand. The team kept the focus on both data transfer and networking aspects, and discovered efficiencies that ensure bandwidth capacity for the Internet can be increased dramatically, Internet could be up to ten times as speedy.

On the future of the Common Agricultural Policy the Parliament is staking out its position for the next long-term budgetary period, running from 2014 to 2020. MEPs want to keep the EU agriculture budget unchanged until 2020 so that farmers have incentives to provide secure food supplies, environmental protection, create new jobs and provide for a competitive EU farming sector.

The European Parliament approved four non-legislative resolutions on regional development which ask the EU's cohesion policy budget for 2014-2020 should at least equal the current one. The vote on the consolidated report on strategy for cohesion policy post-2013 has been postponed to the next plenary session in July.

The EP plenary adopted some amendments on the economic governance six-pack. With these measures added to the original Commission proposal, the EP intends to get more transparency, stronger automatic warnings and sanctions as well as new fines are all part of Parliament's position, although left-of-centre groups argued that this represents too much austerity. Negotiations with the Council will continue with the aim of settling everything by July.