AFP- German car company Opel will close its plant in Antwerp, Belgium this year, GM Europe announced on Thursday.

"We must make this announcement now so that we can secure a viable future for the entire Opel and Vauxhall operations," GM Europe President Nick Reilly said in a statement.

The Opel site, which will close "in the course of 2010," employs 2,600 workers, the statement said.

The EU's highest court has told Germany to ease a restriction on Polish workers, calling it "discriminatory".

The EU's Court of Justice objects to a rule which says that only German firms or foreign firms with a branch in Germany can hire Polish workers.

The case against Germany was brought by Poland and the European Commission.

The court however upheld Germany's right to maintain limits on the number of hired workers from ex-communist states. The limits run until May 2011.

French police say they have arrested a Rwandan doctor who is wanted in his homeland on charges of genocide and war crimes.

Sosthene Munyemana was detained by police on Wednesday in Bordeaux, in the southwest of France, under an extradition warrant issued by Rwanda.

The 45-year-old, who had been working in a hospital emergency ward in the region for eight years, had been on an Interpol list of wanted men since 2002.

Munyemana denies taking part in the 1994 genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 people died in the space of around three months.

The European Parliament is poised to accept the new European Commission, following the resolution of a dispute involving the Bulgarian nominee.

Rumiana Jeleva withdrew her candidacy for the post of EU commissioner for humanitarian aid after fellow politicians accused her of  incompetence and dubious business practices. Bulgaria has named World Bank official Kristalina Georgieva to replace her.

The parliament cannot veto an individual commissioner-designate, but can threaten to block the team as a whole if it has doubts about one or more nominees.

Italy's parliament gave its first nod yesterday to a draft law drastically cutting the duration of trials, a measure critics say is tailor-made to stop pending court cases against Silvio Berlusconi.

The Senate, where the Prime Minister has an ample majority, approved the so-called "short trial" draft bill - one of the most radical reforms of Italy's snail-paced justice system since the end of the Second World War - by 163 to 130 votes. It will now go before the lower house, where it is all but certain to get the green light.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The record industry has for the first time played the nationalism card in its efforts to battle online piracy.

Hoping to up the pressure on governments to introduce harsh French-style anti-piracy laws - which include imposing fines, cutting off internet access and even jailing - offenders, the record industry has warned that illegal downloading and streaming is killing off non-anglophone music in countries such as Spain, France and Brazil, which until now had vibrant music scenes.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU has converted 54 out of the European Commission's 136 foreign delegations into embassy-type missions authorised to speak for the entire union.

The move follows the coming into force last year of the Lisbon Treaty, which has the creation of a new EU diplomatic corps as one of its main provisions.

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All 136 commission delegations were renamed "EU delegations" on 1 January. But only the 54 placements were at the same time quietly given fresh powers in line with their new names.

The super-delegations have taken on the role previously carried out by the national embassies of the member state holding the six-month EU presidency at any given time.

As such, they now co-ordinate the work of the member states' bilateral missions to the countries in question. The heads of the 54 delegations are also empowered to speak on behalf of the EU as a whole. But their statements have to be pre-approved by the 27 EU countries during meetings in Brussels.

BERLIN -- Three months after the United States announced a reformulated missile-defense plan for Poland, the Polish defense minister has announced that American surface-to-air missiles will be deployed near Russian soil.

The minister, Bogdan Klich, said Wednesday that an undisclosed number of missiles would be deployed in the vicinity of Morag, in northern Poland, just 35 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. He said the missiles could arrive as soon as late March or early April.

He said the decision to base the missiles near Morag, and not Warsaw, had no political or strategic significance. "The only reason was the good infrastructure," Mr. Klich said.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek is planning to send a letter to the Council of Ministers, the EU institution representing member states, calling for a suspension of a recent agreement that was to enable the continued transfer of EU citizens' banking data to US investigators.

The US screens certain data held by Swift as part of its fight against terrorism

The decision to call for a delay to the interim deal, scheduled to enter into force on 1 February, was made by leaders of the parliament's different political groups during a meeting in Strasbourg on Thursday (21 January).

MEPs were infuriated when the Council agreed the interim deal with the US on 30 November last year, just a day before the EU's new rulebook, the Lisbon Treaty, came into force, which handed the euro-deputies a greater say over data protection issues.

The controversial deal was negotiated to help the US out of a legal hole, following the relocation of the US database of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) to the Netherlands on 1 January.

It's been a year since Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States on 20 January. But despite his inspiring speeches, he is no Franklin Roosevelt, and even if he were, he needs 60 out of 100 votes in the US Senate to pass anything. Since the end of world war two, a power has emerged with the real potential to carry the world forward

opinion

by steven hill

When I first began travelling to Europe for research in the late nineties, I was trying to understand differences between the political systems and democratic institutions of the United States and Europe. I interviewed politicians, leaders, journalists, bureaucrats, political party leaders, union officials and business leaders. I had conversations with shop vendors, business owners, CEOs, taxi drivers, young people, people on buses, in elevators, restaurants, and cafés, in their homes and in the street, sometimes whether they wanted to talk or not. It was not only the political systems in Europe that were quite different. Europe's institutions had been slowly taking shape during the cold war years. It was a fertile incubation period thanks to the Pax Americana which allowed each nation to take slow steps down its own development path. Europe's brand of `social capitalism' proposes a bold new path for human development, its leadership manifesting in the following ways:

EU justice ministers have put off a request by the US to install full-body scanners at airports across Europe. Studies must first confirm that the devices are safe and don't invade privacy, the ministers say. 

Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said the European Commission was currently conducting such studies.

"Once we have these studies on the table we will make a decision," he told Janet Napolitano, US Homeland Security Secretary, at a press conference following Thursday's talks in Toledo, Spain.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said  Berlin could reach a decision about installing full-body scanners at German airports by the middle of this year.

Usefulness - The current international line between Turin and Modane is used at 30% of its actual capacity and the motorway is used at less than 50% capacity.
Traffic forecast - Up until now the traffic forecasts made by the project workers have turned out to be erroneous. They are based on the concept of infinite growth that says that for every extra point of GDP, there'll be a growth in traffic of 1.4 points. According to the estimates, the current line should be saturated already by this year. This has not happened. Growth still does not exist and goods transport decreases constantly and consequently the need for transport.
According to LTF {Lyon Turin Ferroviaire} the future line would find stability on its balance sheet with 40 million tons of transported goods a year. The current line can transport at least 20 million. Today 4.8 million are carried. Even by transferring all the goods currently transported on the motorways to the railways that would get to the utilization of the current railway of about 50% of its capacity.

Costs - Mauro Moretti , the CEO of Trenitalia has declared that the estimated cost of the line is 120 million per kilometre, that's 3 or 4 times more in relation to the average costs in France (see the article in "Il Sole 24 ore" on 13 January 2010). Furthermore, the estimated costs generally increase 2 to 3 times by the end of the work. Italy has also signed up to an economic agreement by which 65% of the international part would be charged to our country.

Mircea Geoana, who lost the Romanian presidential election in December, getting 49.66% of the vote, blames witchcraft, specifically a "negative energy attack" during a debate that caused him to perform badly. And in fact, President Traian Basescu did go to that debate with a parapsychologist slash clairvoyant slash mind-control expert.

between him and alistair campbell, hmmm. i dunno.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty