German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian bloc has come out firmly in favor of a return to nuclear power, seeing a vote-getter ahead of federal elections due in 15 months.

Although Merkel has long championed a three-way mix in electrical power generation -- fossil, renewables and nuclear -- she has in the past been cautious in openly advocating a reverse in official government policy to phase out nuclear power by 2021.

That all changed at a top-level weekend meeting of her Christian Democrats (CDU) and its Bavarian sister-party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), in the Bavarian town of Erding.

The anti-nuclear decision, passed into law by the government of her Social Democrat predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, was "absolutely wrong," Merkel said as the meeting ended Monday.

The Russian town of Pochep is home to a massive stockpile of chemical weapons, some decades old. Too dangerous to move, Germany is helping build a facility in the town which will destroy the arsenal.

The human toll caused by chemical warfare has been well documented in conflicts such as World War I, Vietnam and the Iran-Iraq war. The dangerous weapons have been outlawed since 1997, when the multilateral Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) entered into force.

Strict timelines have since been set for destroying existing chemical weapons. The 2012 deadline is fast approaching for countries such as Russia, which began construction Tuesday, June 10 on a new facility that will dispose of the chemical weapons.

After years of deadlock, employment ministers in the European Union reached an agreement Monday on rules concerning working time and temporary workers.

The agreement came after the 27 voting members established a qualifying majority for approval of the new measures that will impact millions of European workers and employers. At issue in the votes were common rules for allowing a work week of over 48 hours and the rights of workers from temporary agencies.

 

Breaking a stalemate

 

Efforts to revise EU working time rules had stalled since November 2006 over opt-outs from a 48-hour weekly maximum, especially in Britain, which championed the cause of loose rules.

 

"We believe flexibility and choice is important for our economy and for workers themselves," said British Employment Minister Pat McFadden as he arrived for ministerial talks in Luxembourg.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Former Irish president and human rights activist Mary Robinson has denied any interest in occupying one of the top jobs created by the EU's Lisbon treaty, saying she would prefer to stay away from "any role of a political nature."

Provided the treaty is ratified in all member states, EU leaders will in the coming months have to decide who should be appointed to the top positions of EU president and foreign minister, as well as European Commission president.

""I can say very clearly 'no'", says Mary Robinson

Ms Robinson said she was aware her name had been floated by some - such as EU communications commissioner Margot Wallstrom - as a possible female candidate for one of the posts, but stressed she is not interested.

"I can say very clearly 'no'," she told EUobserver on Monday (9 June) in the margins of a discussion in the parliament on human rights.

BRUSSELS: The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, delivered an unusually blunt rebuke to Microsoft on Tuesday by recommending that businesses and governments use software based on open standards.

Kroes has fought bitterly with Microsoft over the past four years, accusing the company of defying her orders and fining it nearly €1.7 billion, or $2.7 billion, for violating European competition rules. But her comments were the strongest recommendation yet by Kroes to jettison Microsoft products, which are based on proprietary standards, and to use rival operating systems to run computers.

"I know a smart business decision when I see one - choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed," Kroes told a conference in Brussels. "No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one."

Kroes did not name Microsoft in advance copies of her speech, but she made her meaning clear by referring to the only company in EU antitrust enforcement history that has been fined for refusing to comply with European Commission orders - a record held by Microsoft.

GRIFFIN, Indiana: In a year when global harvests need to be excellent to ease the threat of pervasive food shortages, evidence is mounting that they will be average at best. Some farmers are starting to fear disaster.

American corn and soybean farmers are suffering from too much rain, while Australian wheat farmers have been plagued by drought.

"The planting has gotten off to a poor start," said Bill Nelson, a Wachovia grains analyst. "The anxiety level is increasing."

Randy Kron, whose family has been farming in the southwestern corner of Indiana for 135 years, should have corn more than a foot tall by now. But all spring it has seemed as if there were a faucet in the sky. The rain is regular, remorseless.

Some of Kron's fields are too soggy to plant. Some of the corn he managed to get in has drowned, forcing him to replant. The seeds that survived are barely two inches high.

Horses, donkeys and mules in the EU will have to have passports and be electronically tagged, the European Commission has decided.

The new regulation is due to come into force in July next year.

Owners will have to get an electronic chip inserted into their foal's neck in the first six months after its birth.

The plan is to prevent the spread of diseases and avoid the risk of horsemeat going on sale from animals that have been given medication.

Horsemeat is eaten widely in the EU. Countries where it appears on the menu include Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS -Macedonia says it is ready to open EU accession talks in the second half of this year and has taken steps to reassure Brussels over violent incidents that marred the country's recent elections.

A series of gunfights claimed one life and left several people injured in the mainly ethnic Albanian-populated areas in Macedonia during the 1 June elections. Election monitors also reported a host of voting irregularities.

Macedonia has been waiting to launch EU membership talks for almost three years

Following the events, the European Commission pronounced itself "very concerned," while Slovenia, currently holding the six-month rotating EU presidency, said at the time that it "deeply deplored that violence and intimidation accompanied elections in parts of the country."

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday (10 June) in Brussels, Macedonia's foreign minister, Antonio Milososki, aimed to reassure the EU.

The government's child poverty targets lay in tatters today as new figures showed that 2.9 million children are officially living below the breadline in the UK - up 100,000 since 2005-06.

The statistics, released by the Department for Work and Pensions, push the government even further from its target of halving child poverty by 2010.

It is the second successive year that the government has failed to make progress.

The figures also show that in 2006-07 there were 2.5m pensioners living in poverty, a rise of 300,000. This is the first increase in pensioner poverty since 1998.

The number of children and pensioners in poverty is even higher once housing costs such as rent and mortgages are taken into account.

09 June 2008 Zagreb _ Croatian police have detained a reporter for wearing a cap with a symbol of the Ustasha regime, in what the journalist claims is 'double-standards.'

Croatian Television reporter Matija Vuksic, said he was wearing the cap with a symbol of the Ustasha, the name of Croatia's Second World War-era pro-Nazi regime, not out of conviction but for a investigation into how sporting fascist and communist symbols is seen in Croatian society.

First, he recorded citizens' reactions to his cap with the letter "U" on it, using a hidden camera in Zagreb's Ban Jelacic Square and then set out for the first police station. He approached two police officers, who did not take their time to react.

They detained him three hours, after which he left the station, charged with disturbing the public peace and order.

"Nobody was apprehended in last Friday at Thompson's concert for sporting Ustasha symbols and all the things they shouted, like: "Kill the Serb!," complained Vuksic.

The police said there were no Ustasha symbols at the concert.

June 10th, 2008 by Berlaymole (View all posts)

For the past couple of weeks José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, has been running an online poll on his website, asking visitors to express their opinions on EU's biofuels policy. At the last count, some 89 per cent of the 60,000 respondents had voted for the EU to drop its biofuels targets, which have been widely criticised for taking food out of the mouths of the world's hungry to put in the gas tanks of European vehicles. As of today the poll has mysteriously disappeared from President Barroso's website, and nowhere has the result been announced. Has the President of the Commission been taking election advice from Robert Mugabe? Why not just ask him for yourself, using the handy online contact form.

Earlier on ET:

afew:

This may have been mentioned before, but it bears repeating anyway:

The President of the European Commission is running a cyber-poll on whether to maintain the 10% biofuels target for 2020 or not.

With over 38,000 votes, the NO is running at 87%.

Click on over there and let Barroso know what you think.

Continental Europe should take the lead in devising new rules for financial markets because the Anglo-Saxon model of regulation has failed, Angela Merkel has told the Financial Times.

The German chancellor said ahead of next month's Group of Eight summit, which is expected to discuss new regulation, that the largely "Anglo-Saxon" organisation of financial markets undervalued the growing weight and importance of the eurozone.

In particular, she called for a European credit ratings agency to counterbalance the dominance of Moody's and Standard and Poor's. "Europe has developed a certain independence thanks to the euro," she said. "But . . . in terms of the rules, the transparency guidelines and the entire standardisation of financial markets, we still have a strongly Anglo-Saxon-dominated system.

"I think that in the medium term Europe will need a working ratings agency because the robust currency system of the euro has not yet secured sufficient influence over the rules governing financial markets."

A European ratings agency is among several suggestions Germany has made in the G8 leading industrial nations as part of a proposed overhaul following the credit squeeze.

Berlin also wants to ban the agencies from rating products they helped to create. Ms Merkel said she would welcome new capital adequacy ratios for banks, linking the amount they must put aside to the level of risk in their asset portfolios.

"We need to think about the relationship between capital and risk," Ms Merkel said. "But these rules can only be discussed at an international level."

"The eventuality of an Irish rejection would be a problem not only for the French presidency but for Europe," Sarkozy said. "It's for the Irish to decide on this, but what Madame Merkel and I have decided is that, whatever happens, the reaction will be a Franco-German one."

"Brown could come under strong pressure to abandon the treaty's ratification, now in its final stages in the British Parliament, and declare the EU's attempts to reform itself over," Hugo Brady, research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, said in a policy paper.

"If the treaty is abandoned, EU countries are likely to give up on attempts to ratify wide-ranging reform treaties, preferring instead the ease of working more closely together through avant-garde groups on matters such as defense, foreign policy or taxation."

integrationists have been making noises about enhanced cooperations, two-speeds, core Europe, Europe with variable geometry, etc since the Treaty of Amsterdam (and getting louder in the last couple of years) and if the Treaty of Lisbon fails that will be the only way forward and it will be taken.

But diplomats would struggle to give the Irish any genuine commitments to address the issues of concern raised in the Irish referendum campaign, since most fall outside the scope of the treaty.

...

The most likely option is that the treaty would be abandoned and that the EU would attempt to revise its current arrangements only when it prepares to admit the next nation due to join, Croatia, in 2011 or 2012.

Andrew Duff, Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional issues in the European Parliament, said that a rejection of the treaty in Ireland would mean its demise.

...

He also said that ideas of forming an advance guard of countries excluding Ireland would be difficult without the Lisbon treaty because there are fewer possibilities to do so under the existing Nice Treaty.

I don't suppose this will have any impact on Irish voters tomorrow....

You can't be me, I'm taken