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/ 3 December 2003
The European Commission was left humiliated last week after European Union finance ministers ignored its demands to punish France and Germany for borrowing too heavily. In a move widely condemned as a political fudge, most ministers decided to suspend the sanctions mechanisms.
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/ 17 November 2003
Gunter Verheugen, the German Social Democrat in charge of enlargement at the European Commission, is looking a little more relaxed these days, though he’s not demob-happy quite yet. After giving the European Union’s 10 incoming members a fairly clean bill of health, the moment is approaching when he will be out of a job.
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/ 14 October 2003
The United States is to try to break the United Nations deadlock over Iraq by tabling in the next 24 hours a revised draft resolution that it hopes will bring Russia aboard. The fresh version of the Security Council resolution sets a December 15 deadline for the Iraqi governing council to produce a timetable for the transfer of power to Iraqis.
Iraq’s governing council believes it will take many months to draw up a Constitution before power can be handed over to an Iraqi government through a general election. The warning will come as a challenge to the US administration, currently under pressure from foreign critics to transfer power swiftly to a local administration.
The sequence of events surrounding the leaking of David Kelly’s name prior to his suicide implicates the UK’s Ministry of Defence and Blair’s office. Now, fingers are being pointed left, right and centre. Whose head will roll?
The International Criminal Court is likely to investigate war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), its chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, said this week.
It may take some time — perhaps even the entire six months of Italy’s European Union presidency — to get over Silvio Berlusconi’s jaw-dropping performance in the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week. But the institution seems destined to quickly return to its normal sleepy ways.
Europe’s ban on biotech foods is to be lifted and replaced by rules for clear labelling of all genetically modified (GM) products.
The European Union’s first Constitution, creating a union president and foreign minister, has been 15 tortuous months in the making in Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s Convention.
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/ 6 December 2002
Lights have been burning late in the European Union Council of Ministers building the last few nights as diplomats have scrabbled to conclude complex negotiations leading to the largest expansion in the club’s history.