European Union News

The agreement reached by transport ministers on new EU rules setting out how competition on the rail market must work in practice has been welcomed by the Commission. According to the Commission Vice-President and responsible for transport Siim Kallas, the new rules will ensure that opportunities to compete exist not just in theory but in practice and passengers and companies will get more choice and better quality services.

Viviane Reding, EU Justice Commissioner, presented a Green Paper asking ten questions on how to strengthen mutual trust in the field of detention. The Green Paper kicks off a public consultation that it has as main goal to seek views on detention in the EU's area of justice, in order to explore more closely the links between detention issues and mutual trust in such area.

On its first formal response to the Commission's draft budget for 2012, EP Budgets Committee stated that essential investments must go ahead without delay to support education and social inclusion, reduce poverty and develop a knowledge-based society.

Thanks to a new EU-funded research, communication between rescue workers after a terrorist attack or a natural disaster could soon be made more efficient. Researchers constructed an Internet-based 'app' that can keep rescuers and their central control room in touch independently, opposed to relying on central wireless access points or the TETRA police radio system.

According to Eurostat, forests cover around 40% of the EU27 land area and half the EU27 consumption of renewable energy comes from wood. In the European Union, three quarters of forest area was available for wood supply in 2010. Furthermore, renewable sources of energy provided 9% of total gross inland energy consumption in the EU in 2009.

The approved 2010 activity report highlighted that protecting the environment and standing up for citizens’ rights are the major goals of the EP Petitions Committee. MEPs also call for a dedicated web portal to be set up for petitions and for the committee to play a key role in dealing with citizens' initiatives.

EU27 Member States granted citizenship to 776,000 persons in 2009. One year before, it was granted to 699,000 persons. The new citizens came mainly from Africa, Asia and non-EU27 Europe. The main contribution to this increase came from the United Kingdom and was a consequence of the unusually low number of citizenships that, for purely administrative reasons, the United Kingdom granted in 2008.

The Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee met on 14 of June with Mario Draghi, candidate designate for the European Central Bank presidency. Mr. Draghi explained to the Committee that the ECB must not be diverted from its primary goal of price stability and he assures to the MEPs that he would use the European Parliament venue to strengthen the ECB's accountability to citizens.

The proposal presented by the Commission would replace the current Directive (2004/40/EC) and it is aimed to revamp rules to protect EU workers from harmful electromagnetic fields. More specifically, this proposal is aimed to protect workers like doctors and nurses giving patients magnetic resonance imaging scans (MRI), people working with radar, welders and workers reparing power lines.

The new VLT (Very Large Telescope) Survey Telescope (VST) the latest addition to the four VLT unit telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at the top of Cerro Paranal (Chile) and has got images from Messier 17 (M17), a hotbed of star formation located about 5,500 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation and from Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest of all known globular star clusters.

The European Commission has launched the process to to find the city that will inherit the European Green Capital title in 2014. EU Environment Commissioner, Janez Potočnik stated that this award is a powerful incentive to help convince local authorities that sustainable urban development is the key to a successful future.

To extend the temporary crisis-related derogation that allows European Globalisation Fund (EGF) to be used for workers as a result of the current financial and economic crisis in addition to those losing their job because of changes in global trade patterns, has been proposed by the European Commission.