Sir, In your coverage of the EU’s clean vehicle procurement legislation, you note that aim of the policy is “to kick-start a market in technologies that are currently not commercially viable, such as biofuels, hydrogen, natural gas or LPG, electric or hybrid vehicles”. While appreciating the spirit of the sentiment, I would like to draw [...]

Open letter to the newly appointed trade commissioner, Baroness Catherine Ashton BusinessEurope out of Charlemagne now! Baroness Ashton, welcome to your new position as EU trade commissioner. I am hopeful that we will be able to collaborate successfully, especially on environmental and global justice issues. During the autumn of 2006 your predecessor, Peter Mandelson, presented [...]

Sir, The EFN welcomes the intention to move on with the enlargement process. Just coming back from Croatia, where I met nurse leaders from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and FYR of Macedonia, it becomes clear to me that nurses want to belong to the EU family. They have enormous challenges in front of them when it comes [...]

Sir, EU regulators continue to call for a third pan-European card payment system. All well and good. However, their commitment to stoking payment network competition and how they’ve pursued it leave much to be desired. Their actions suggest they simply want another regulated card-payment network public utility, one they can call European. Regulators worry the [...]

Sir, The European Federation of Nurses (EFN) supports the European Public Health Alliance’s (EPHA) position on the registration of NGOs in the register. If you look at the register now, it is very clear that there is no financial transparency. EFN is registered under Belgium law and all its financial details are published and transparent. [...]

Sir, In recent months EurActiv has published several very useful articles and reports on the new EU legislation on pesticides. Your latest LinksDossier “Pesticides: Striking the right balance?” is another useful contribution. However, I was surprised that it made no mention at all of the fundamental nature of the change this legislation would bring about [...]

Sir, We all know that the European Commission’s raison d’etre is to rule, regulate, issue directives and otherwise interfere and meddle with everyone’s lives, but surely is it not a bit presumptious even for Viviane Reding to think that it can “govern” the internet? What about the rest of mankind outside of the 27 borders? [...]

Sir, In your article ‘EU warned of Russia’s Arctic appetite’, you wrote “Poignant, who is an historian by training, recalls that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made the historic mistake of donating Crimea to Ukraine”. Crimea wasn’t donated to Ukraine – this is a beautiful myth. The Parliament of the Soviet Union requested the Parliament [...]

Sir, Nach dem ‘nein’ der Iren nun der nächste Rückschritt für den Vertrag von Lissabon, diesmal von Großbritannien, was nicht wirklich erstaunt, sind die Briten doch schon seit Jahren ein ‘Problemkind’ der EU und bremsen viele Entscheidungen. Die vollmundige Ankündigung von Tory Chef David Cameron, im Falle eines Wahlsieges ein Referendum abzuhalten, zeigt einmal mehr, [...]

Sir, On 9 September 2008, the Financial Times, the New York Times and Bloomberg ran stories about a search engine’s latest global ambition. It involves creating a new satellite system to reach the planet’s ‘O3b’ (meaning “other three billion” people) without Internet access. That plan is curiously myopic on two points: A) There is an [...]