EU Agencies – Whatever you do, we work for you

Source: European Commission

From Stockholm to Crete and from Lisbon to Warsaw, 29 agencies provide service, information and know-how to the people of the European Union and beyond. The agencies work within many different fields such as environment,
food safety, transportation, trade marks, education, or fundamental rights.

This brochure dedicates a page to each of the agencies, describing their work and giving contact details.

“Don’t buy exotic animal souvenirs.” In Animal souvenirs

No extra EU cash for languages ‘until 2013’

No additional funding will be released to boost EU language policy until 2013 at the earliest, said the commissioner responsible for the dossier Leonard Orban yesterday (18 September 2008), unveiling the EU executive’s new multilingualism strategy.

Online campaigns ‘key’ to voter turnout in EU elections

The Internet could help European parties to "reinvigorate and rejuvenate" politics and generate a higher turnout in the upcoming European Parliament elections in June 2009, a panel of election strategists told MEPs in Brussels on 17 September.

US-style ‘financial socialism’ not an option for Europe

Enlargement will not fall victim to Lisbon Treaty, says Commission

The Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty and its uncertain future should not be used as "scapegoats" to block enlargement, Commissioner Olli Rehn said in a speech yesterday (18 September) which was primarily directed at Germany and France, which have ruled out further expansion without the new Treaty.

The European Pact on Immigration and Asylum

EuroparlTV

by nosemonkey

It’s about time, but the European Parliament just got that little bit more accessible to us members of the great unwashed with today’s launch of EuroparlTV. With subtitles and voiceovers in 23 languages, initial impressions are good, though I can’t pretend to have played with it enough to have worked out the bugs as of yet.

Europarltv pumps out Strasbourg propaganda

by Jon

I’ve been having a look at Europarl TV, launched yesterday with a bit of fanfare in Brussels. I was not at the launch so I didn’t profit from a few glasses of wine to temper my views on the project. I instead watched a bit of the news show this morning and while the technology is smooth enough the content of the first item on the ‘news’ was so skewed it was untrue. It was a piece about what to do about the roof of the EP in Strasbourg having fallen in (for more on that see this post), and as a consequence whether the EP should be just based in Brussels.

MAIN FOCUS: The controversial Roma conference | 18/09/2008

The first EU summit on the situation of the Roma has taken place in Brussels. More than 500 representatives of European institutions, governments and civic organisations, among them representatives of the Roma and Sinti communities, convened to discuss questions dealing primarily with the discrimination of the largest European minority. What are the views of Europe’s press on the meeting?

The lame left?

by Douglas Muir

Newsweek has a longish (for Newsweek) article this week about how the center-left is in trouble in pretty much all the large European countries:

No matter what they call themselves—Social Democrats, Socialists or Labour—rarely have they simultaneously appeared so troubled. In Britain, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s popularity has hit rock bottom. Germany’s Social Democrats are a dwindling party, squeezed between conservatives in the center and populist extremists on the left. In France and Italy, telegenic new-style rightists have managed to reduce the left-wing opposition to tatters. Even Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the last unchallenged mainstream-left ruler of a major European power, looks increasingly besieged as the Spanish economic miracle crashes all around him…