UK News
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from Global News Journal:
EU delivers its own “State of the Union” address
The European Union talks frequently about wanting to be a bigger player in the world, about making its political influence match its economic weight and the need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States.
And at least in one respect it can now say it's America's equal -- both have a State of the Union address.
Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, delivered his inaugural State of the Union speech to the European Parliament on Tuesday, a sweeping assessment of where the bloc of 27 countries stands and what it needs to do to be better in the future, tapping a similar vein to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address to Congress in January.
But beyond the matching titles, and some common themes, there were few similarities, at least from a rhetorical point of view.
Mandelson slip-up confirms eurosceptics’ fears
Business minister Peter Mandelson built his reputation as a sure-footed communicator for the Labour Party, but the former EU trade commissioner suffered a rare slip-up on Friday when he confirmed many eurosceptics’ fears that the European Commission relished its lack of democratic accountability.
“The best principle of the European Commission ever invented was that it should not be elected — that it was remote, unaccountable, a major bureaucracy that could do good for Europe and can take the risks of saying things and doing things that are not as easy to do in the member states,” said Mandelson.
from Global News Journal:
EU’s Ashton seeks stronger ties with U.S.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton
Catherine Ashton has signalled her intention of giving the European Union's relationship with the United States more prominence in her new role as the EU's high representative for foreign affairs.
How productive that relationship proves to be depends largely on how much Washington believes it needs the EU and how much it deals with the European Union as a whole, rather than with its member states one-to-one.
Time for salary cap for bankers?
It’s not a great time to be a banker at the moment with financial apocalypse making the pin-striped gents probably more loathed than estate agents or journalists. Thousands of them have lost their jobs and those that are still in paid employment are finding that their renumeration packages are coming under ever greater public scrutiny.
Over the weekend reports that the Royal Bank of Scotland was about to award its staff a billion pounds in bonuses prompted outrage at a time of soaring unemployment and with a deep recession looming. Most people would agree it is a no-brainer that a company that has just posted the biggest-ever financial loss in British corporate history, required a 20-billion-pound government bail-out to stay afloat last year and is now nearly 70-percent state-owned should not be allowing its staff to be trousering huge bonuses.
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The Wall
