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[ Thursday November 16, 2006 - Category : General ]

Civil society

In the beautiful city of Bergamo, in Northern Italy, the Commission last week met with hundreds of representatives of civil society organisations to discuss how to consult and communicate with citizens.

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previous entries

[ Tuesday November 14, 2006 - Category : General ]

Slovenia, Rome

Last week, my family and I spent a few days in the home of my colleague Janez Potocnik in Slovenia. We had a wonderful time while seeing and learning more about this small, new EU Member State. The size of it allowed us to see wine-growing up in the mountains as well as the environment in the valleys, the capital Ljubljana and a glimpse of the Adriatic Sea.

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[ Thursday November 09, 2006 - Category : General ]

Turkey

At the Commission‘s meeting yesterday we had a good debate about Enlargement. On the table was a strategy paper for enlargement policy, including a report on the EU‘s capacity to integrate new members, and progress reports on a number of countries: Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo.

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[ Friday October 27, 2006 - Category : General ]

Madeleine Albright

I had the pleasure of having Madeleine Albright for dinner at home last Friday. (Late afternoon after work I went home and around the house like a whirlwind to cook, clean and lay a nice table – my husband usually prepares those things, but he is in Sweden for the moment). Madame Albright looked slimmer (“Now that I do not have to eat for my country”, as she said) and full of energy. She told me enthusiastically about the work of a new group to extend the rule of law to the world‘s...

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[ Thursday October 26, 2006 - Category : General ]

Alcohol

The Commission has now adopted “A strategy to support Member states in reducing alcohol related harm“. It is an important document, although the alcohol producers lobbied fiercely to stop all “sharp” proposals, like warning labels or taxes. Even they can not deny the chilling facts about harmful and hazardous alcohol consumption.

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[ Wednesday October 25, 2006 - Category : General ]

The Commission's Accounts

Some readers have asked me to comment on the Court of Auditors latest report on the Commission‘s accounts. I will be glad to do so. This is a much misunderstood subject, although I think some people are only too happy to misunderstand it. I see on the internet lots of the usual headlines from some quarters about “Euro-fraud, year 12“, “False Accounting” etc.

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[ Friday October 20, 2006 - Category : General ]

Summit in Lahti and Childrens rights

I am shocked and saddened that in Russia journalists and public figures are victims of hired killers. The perpetrators should be pursued with full determination and prosecuted! I am sure that European leaders will be expressing their deep concern to President Putin at the Summit in Lahti today!

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[ Thursday October 19, 2006 - Category : General ]

Competitions and Awards

On Tuesday this week the winning design was selected for the EU‘s 50th anniversary logo competition. This was the result of a process started back in July when we invited design students all over Europe to take part in a competition to design a logo which would be used by all EU Institutions next year for events and publications related to the 50th Anniversary of the Treaty of Rome.

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[ Friday October 13, 2006 - Category : General ]

Friday the 13th : bad luck or…?

My short stay in Provence at an intensive course in French started badly…The taxi driver who picked me up at the train station spoke French at the speed of lightening and with a heavy accent which made my heart sink.“ I will never be able to learn this language well enough even to manage a trip in a taxi on my own”, was my first thought.

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[ Monday October 09, 2006 - Category : General ]

An Inconvenient Truth

Former Vice-President of the US Al Gore is travelling Europe with a book and a movie titled “An inconvenient truth” about climate change. It is his impressive, factual statement about the effects and challenges of global warming. I had the opportunity to meet with Mr Gore in Amsterdam where we both spoke at a conference arranged by GRI (Global Reporting Initiative). They have developed reporting guidelines for companies and organisations who want to do business working with all three...

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[ Wednesday October 04, 2006 - Category : General ]

Sweden - the secret files

The news from North Korea is dispiriting for anyone hoping the world is becoming a better and less dangerous place. Something that recently made me very happy was to meet my old friend Oscar Temaru. Oscar is now the President of French Polynesia but used to be the Mayor of Faaa, a small municipality in Tahiti. We met many years ago to protest against the French nuclear bomb tests in Moruroa and for Polynesian independence.

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[ Thursday September 28, 2006 - Category : General ]

New Member States

Yesterday the Commission decided about the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU. They will be welcome to join from January 2007 and must continue to pursue the reforms needed, particularly in the area of justice and home affairs.

The most recent enlargement – like others before it, including when Sweden, Finland and Austria joined at the same time – has proved to be a success. It has confirmed that enlarging the Union can produce a win-win situation for both the existing and the incoming Member...

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[ Thursday September 21, 2006 - Category : General ]

Should I stay or should I go?

Well, well! Thank you very much to all those people posting nice comments and asking me to “Kom hem till Sverige”. I have not had much time to think lately, much less write a blog! The Swedish general election was in the end a very exciting event with a resulting (intellectual) hangover… To the Swedish media I have refrained from commenting and analyzing in detail the election campaign since I spent most of the time in Brussels. But I seem to be caught up in a media frenzy, trying to find...

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[ Sunday September 17, 2006 - Category : General ]

Last week

Last Saturday in one of the beautiful parks of Brussels my family and I enjoyed listening to Barbara Hendricks‘ impressive soprano voice. She also uses her voice to speak out for refugees and knows a lot about wanting a citizenship. Her experience as a black American woman has given her an engagement in those issues and she is a UN-goodwill ambassador for the UNHCR. Here are some pictures from my private encounter with Barbara (who happens to live in Sweden).

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[ Friday September 08, 2006 - Category : General ]

Helping the needy

More people have drowned in the Mediterranean sea, fleeing Africa, than died in the war in Lebanon. In neither case can the European Union escape the responsibility to act and show solidarity. With all the political and diplomatic efforts that we can mobilise, with the wide range of tools we have at our disposal such as humanitarian aid, military help such as soldiers for peacekeeping forces, civil protection such as cleaning up oil spills and...

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