#AlertePollutionRivières ou sols contaminés, déchets industriels abandonnés… Vous vivez à proximité d’un site pollué ? Cliquez ici pour nous alerter !Au pied du parc national des Calanques se trouvent la baie de Cassis (Bouches-du-Rhône) et son paysage de carte postale. Mais ici, un plongeur a fait une découverte préoccupante. Une coulée noire opaque se déverse d’un tuyau. Ce sont les eaux traitées par la station d’épuration de Cassis. “On était avec des plongeurs. On est scandalisés. Quand on arrive sur zone, on ne peut pas nier l’évidence qu’il y a un grave problème“, explique Michel Nox, le plongeur qui a découvert ces rejets.Les rejets ne sont pas nocifs pour l’homme et le milieu naturelLa station d’épuration se situe au bord de la mer. À cause d’un incendie survenu il y a quatre mois, les eaux ne sont plus traitées comme avant. La station utilise désormais une dose plus importante de chlorure ferrique, un composé qui donne aux eaux traitées une couleur sombre. C’est inoffensif pour l’être humain selon un expert. Même constat à la mairie : il n’y a pas de danger pour la baignade. Le JT
JT de 19/20 du jeudi 22 août 2019 L’intégrale
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Livret A : le taux va-t-il encore baisser ?
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Porc : sera-t-il bientôt plus cher dans les rayons ?
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G7 à Biarritz : le centre-ville bientôt bouclé
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Il n’y aura, à priori, pas de nouvelle bande-annonce de “The Dark Knight Rises” d’ici sa sortie en salles. Mais ça n’empêche pas le film de Christopher Nolan de s’illustrer à travers des spots TV.
Si Bane fait sauter des ponts dans le film, la Warner semble avoir ouvert les vannes en coulisses. Moins actif que ses concurrent directs (Avengers et Spider-Man) lorsqu’il s’agissait de se dévoiler, Batman semble en effet être passé de la première à la quatrième sans casser l’embrayage depuis le début du mois de mai. Et si une nouvelle bande-annonce n’est pas encore (ou pas du tout) à l’ordre du jour, les affiches et photos sont là pour nous rassasier, au même titre que les spots TV. Les deux premiers viennent d’ailleurs d’être diffusés, et la bonne nouvelle, c’est qu’ils contiennent pas mal d’images inédites ainsi que des petites touches d’humour, qui feront sans doute office d’éclaircies dans le ciel noir qui s’apprête obscurcir Gotham City le 25 juillet prochain. Maximilien Pierrette
Sept pays amazoniens ont signé un pacte pour la protection de la plus grande forêt tropicale au monde. Il s’agit de la Colombie, du Pérou, de l’Equateur, la Bolivie, le Brésil, le Surinam et le Guyana, tous réunis vendredi 6 septembre pour un sommet présidentiel pour l’Amazonie. Le texte prévoit une surveillance par satellite et une intervention coordonnée en cas de sinistre, en réponse aux récents incendies qui ont ravagé des milliers de kilomètres carrés de forêt.Le président colombien, Ivan Duque, hôte du sommet dans la ville de Leticia, a indiqué qu’il s’agissait d’un “mécanisme de coordination” et que les pays se réuniraient de nouveau lors de la conférence des Nations unies sur le climat en décembre.Nouvelles piques de Bolsonaro à MacronDurant le sommet, auquel il a participé par visioconférence, le président brésilien, Jair Bolsonaro, a déclaré que ce pacte constituait une réaffirmation de la souveraineté de chacun des pays amazoniens. Il s’en est, en outre, à nouveau pris à Emmanuel Macron : “Cette fureur internationale a seulement servi à ce que le chef d’une grande nation attaque le Brésil et mette en danger notre souveraineté.”Click Here: Cheap QLD Maroons Jersey
#AlertePollutionRivières ou sols contaminés, déchets industriels abandonnés… Vous vivez à proximité d’un site pollué ? Cliquez ici pour nous alerter !“Le peuple ou le profit”, “Nous sommes en crise, il faut agir !”, scandaient les manifestants. La jeune militante suédoise Greta Thunberg, à l’origine des grèves de la jeunesse pour le climat, a porté timidement son combat, vendredi 13 septembre, devant la Maison Blanche, accompagnée de plusieurs centaines de manifestants.“N’abandonnez jamais”, a lancé la militante à la fin de la manifestation, s’adressant quelques secondes aux quelques centaines de jeunes qui s’étaient rassemblés, avec la Maison Blanche en arrière-plan. “Nous continuerons, et rendez-vous la semaine prochaine, le 20 septembre”, a-t-elle ajouté. Arrivée fin août à New York, l’adolescente de 16 ans était la vedette de ce premier rassemblement dans la capitale américaine, mais elle est restée en retrait, disant aux journalistes qui voulaient lui parler qu’elle ne voulait pas être le centre de l’attention, exactement comme elle l’avait fait à New York deux semaines auparavant.@GretaThunberg och skolstrejken i Washington DC. pic.twitter.com/oi9fRqvAL6 — Patrik Holmström (@Sr_Patrik) September 13, 2019
#GretaThunberg à une manif pour le climat avec de jeunes activistes américains devant la Maison Blanche. Ne s’exprime pas pour l’instant. pic.twitter.com/F1iWFaRfby — Sonia Dridi (@Sonia_Dridi) September 13, 2019
Cette manifestation, en face de la Maison Blanche, constitue le premier événement majeur auquel participe Greta Thunberg lors de son séjour de six jours à Washington, visant à mettre la pression sur l’administration climatosceptique de Donald Trump. Elle doit aussi prendre la parole devant le Congrès des Etats-Unis.Click Here: cheap nsw blues jersey
Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, is known more for pragmatism than vision, but on Monday (15 November) she set out an ambitious vision for Germany and for Europe. “The task of our generation is to complete economic and monetary union and build political union in Europe step by step,” she told a conference of her party, the centre-right Christian Democrats.
A majority of the party voiced its support for this, Merkel’s clearest indication yet of what she means when she argues that the answer to the eurozone crisis is more, not less Europe.
On economic integration, the CDU’s proposals focus on disciplining countries that fail to respect limits on debts and public deficits. They would be referred to the European Court of Justice, and – as the programme describes it – an “EU Austerity Commissioner” would be appointed to chivvy the national government into budget cuts.
The freshest aspects of the proposals were political. Under the CDU’s plans, the right to make legislative proposals, which is currently the exclusive right of the European Commission, would be extended to both the Council of Ministers and to the European Parliament. The president of the Commission would be directly elected by EU citizens. And the EU would eventually develop a bicameral political system, made up of the Parliament and the Council, each enjoying equal status.
Could Merkel’s policy become German policy? That depends now on the two smaller parties in the governing coalition.
Their consent on economic issues seems the easier task. The CDU’s Bavarian centre-right sibling, the Christian Social Union (CSU), is likely to support moves to tighten economic discipline. The liberal Free Democrats (FDP) also favour greater economic discipline.
However, the CSU has traditionally resisted the transfer of power away from Germany’s federal states to central government and to the EU institutions. The FDP’s leaders will probably seek to keep the party true to its pro-European traditions, but voters’ frustration over the eurozone bail-outs has strengthened a Eurosceptic wing of the party.
Member states’ intransigence could sink the energy-efficiency directive.
European Union member states are likely to run into tough criticism from the European Parliament after they agreed an unambitious position on energy efficiency yesterday (3 April). The mandate that the Council has adopted for negotiations with MEPs on the draft energy-efficiency directive would ease the obligations envisaged by the European Commission.
The Commission has proposed a 1.5% annual energy savings requirement. Member states have retained the target, but made it easier to meet, by allowing generation and distribution to be included, and retroactively permitting savings measures to be taken into account from as far back as 2008.
The directive is meant to combine and replace the energy-services directive and the combined heat and power directive, to help the EU honour its commitment of saving 368 million tonnes of oil equivalent per year by 2020.
Claude Turmes, a Green Luxembourgeois MEP who is leading negotiations in the Parliament, said the Council’s mandate was not acceptable, and showed that “governments are just contradicting themselves” by taking positions that conflict with the 2020 target that they have already agreed.
Members of the Parliament’s industry committee agreed on a strengthening of the Commission’s proposal in January, explicitly excluding any early action or generation and distribution from calculations of savings.
The Coalition for Energy Savings, a campaigning group, said the Council’s position was no improvement on current legislation, and could “even be a weakening of what is already done”. It estimates that the Parliament’s version would get the EU to its 2020 target, while the Commission’s proposal would get it only two-thirds of the way there – and the Council’s position would condemn the EU to reaching no more than one-third of the target by 2020.
The Danish presidency is believed to be concerned that such a weak member-state position would not win MEPs’ support, jeopardising the early agreement on the new measure that Denmark had placed at the centre of its environmental priorities. Talks are due to begin on 11 April. The Council’s mandate is understood to be open to further discussion. But the risk exists that the Commission might just scrap the proposal on the grounds that a measure so diluted could be pointless or even detrimental.
Talk of withdrawal makes the energy industry nervous. One industry source told European Voice this makes for uncertainty, “at a time when investment certainty is badly needed for the next eight years”.
BEUC, the European consumers’ organisation, is also apprehensive about a dispute between the Parliament and member states on energy targets. This could “weaken crucial measures aimed at helping consumers curb their energy consumption,” it said.
Van Rompuy told that the Parliament wants to be “an equal partner” in drafting treaty.
MEPs today demanded that Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, ensure that the European Parliament gets a full role in the drafting of the ‘fiscal compact’ treaty.
Martin Schulz, leader of the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group, and Joseph Daul, leader of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), led the call for parliamentary oversight over the new treaty, which is supposed to be drafted and signed by March.
Schulz told Van Rompuy during a debate on the outcome of the 8-9 December European Council that the Parliament wanted to be an “equal partner” in drafting the treaty. “Without the Parliament this won’t be operational at all,” he said.
The Parliament’s four main groups – the EPP, the S&D, the Liberals and Greens – were all united “to fight” for a full role, Schulz said.
He pointed out that the Parliament’s participation and backing was vital to pass fast-track EU legislation that the European Commission said was needed to ensure the treaty worked within existing fiscal discipline rules.
Daul said the failure of all 27 EU leaders to agree on treaty change has put the EU in both a legal and political mess. He said “everything had to be done to involve” MEPs in the drafting of the treaty to ensure the Parliament “plays its rightful role” in making sure the treaty is democratically legitimate.
Van Rompuy made only vague remarks on the Parliament’s role in negotiations on drafting the treaty, conceived to oblige member states to balance their national budgets and give greater automatic effect to the EU’s rules on fiscal discipline.
He said, however, that the Council “will associate the European Parliament … in the work and the process in putting together this inter-governmental treaty.”
José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, tried to assuage MEP’s concerns by saying that the Commission would do “all it can” to make sure the draft treaty was “acceptable” for EU institutions.
Rebecca Harms, co-leader of the Green group, said the decisions adopted by EU leaders not only created new EU divisions but were also the wrong decisions to take to solve the crisis. “All the things we really need now to solve the crisis are those that can be done without treaty change,” she said.
A meeting of the Parliament’s Conference of Presidents, which groups the leaders of the parliament’s political groups, plus the Parliament president, decided on Monday (12 December) to draft a “roadmap” for member states to get out of the crisis.
The resolution, which is to be voted on during the Parliament’s first session in January, is to set out the Parliament’s views on what EU member states should do. It rejects treaty change as being an ineffective short-term solution and urges eurozone members to give the European Central Bank (ECB) more powers.
Maria Echevarria on her career switch from Spanish agricultural issues to co-ordination at the European Economic and Social Committee.
Looking back at her career to date, Maria Echevarria considers herself fortunate to have experienced EU policy from several different perspectives – at the regional, national and EU levels. “This has enriched my experience and my views,” says Echevarria, who since 2010 has been director of general affairs at the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC).
The job involves managing people, organising meetings and conferences, and co-ordinating the work of different departments. This is a big change from her previous, policy-based roles at the Castilla-León regional government, the European Commission’s directorate-general for agriculture, Spain’s ministry of environment, agriculture, fisheries and food, and Spain’s permanent representation to the EU.
“I had spent almost my whole life dealing with agriculture, fisheries and environment policy,” says Echevarria, who studied veterinary science, but realised early on that being a vet was not for her. She specialised in agro-economics and later gained a master’s degree in public management.
Time for a change
The career shift came about because Echevarria, who had been working for several years at the Spanish permanent representation, realised that she wanted to stay in the EU milieu at the end of the Spanish presidency. When the vacancy came up at the EESC, an institution she had dealt with in several of her previous jobs, she jumped at the chance.
The main attraction was the EESC’s role as the institutional intermediary between civil society and the larger EU institutions. “I have always been convinced of the importance of dialogue with civil society,” Echevarria says, sitting in her office overlooking a quiet courtyard. “If you want realistic policies that are well-accepted by civil society, it is necessary to involve civil society.” For her, the EESC is the only body that offers the European institutions the opinion of representative civil society organisations from every member state.
From her time at the directorate-general for agriculture, her first post in Brussels, Echevarria is very aware of the Commission’s open consultations, where everyone can comment on proposed legislation. “This provides lots of little pictures, but not the whole picture,” she says. Many organisations do not get involved in such consultations, and sometimes it is simply those with the strongest lobby groups that are heard, she notes.
“What our committee offers is a common and balanced approach,” she says, taking as an example a proposal on the Common Agricultural Policy. Farmers, environmentalists, consumers, trade unions and employers would all be heard, she explains. “It’s hard to reach a compromise, but our members strike a balance between their different opinions.” Echevarria considers this grass-roots information to be crucial for European policy and decision-making.
Cutting out the commute
Echevarria’s work is predominantly office-based – in contrast to her work for the Spanish government in the 1990s, when she travelled back and forth to Brussels twice a month for management committee and working-group meetings at the Council. Now that she has a six year-old son, juggling the demands of being a mother and a director leave little time for commuting.
Echevarria, the EESC’s only female senior manager, says she is a typical Spaniard in the sense that family is very important to her. Dotted around her office are photos of her family, a drawing by her son and an engraving by her sister that has accompanied her from job to job.
She misses Spain and her family there, but her desire to work in the heart of Europe is too strong to go back. “I want to be at the centre of the EU, where the policies are designed, where the decisions are taken. I believe in Europe; we need Europe,especially now.”
Anna Jenkinson is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.
New rules to regulate the mortgage industry look set to be delayed as MEPs attempt to make numerous of changes to the European Commission’s proposal for legislation.
Members of the European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee were initially expected to hold a vote on their position in January, but that was postponed until its next meeting, on 28 February. Now the vote has again been put back – possibly as far as the committee’s meeting on 25-26 April.
EU officials say that the large number of amendments put forward by MEPs on what was a relatively short Commission proposal has meant that discussions between Antolín Sánchez Presedo, a Spanish socialist MEP who is leading the Parliament’s work on the issue, and his counterparts in other political groups have taken longer than expected.
Ability to lend
Some of the disagreements in the Parliament are about the balance between imposing regulation on the industry and ensuring that institutions retain the ability to lend.
Similar divergences persist between member states. Officials from Denmark, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers, have tried to broker agreement by presenting a compromise text, but no deal has been struck.
The delays mean that hopes of reaching an agreement between the Parliament and Council by the summer, which was the initial target, are receding.
Even the US public is paying attention to the eurozone crisis. But will the US’s and EU’s shared problems prompt joint initiatives?
Washington, DC hosts the US-EU summit on Monday (28 November), and never has this annual meeting occurred at such an inauspicious moment.
American anxiety about the eurozone crisis is growing in Congress, and even in the news media and among the general public.
In the second week of November, the US news media – including print, online, network and cable TV and radio – devoted 11% of coverage to the European economy, for the first time exceeding coverage of the domestic economy, according to analysis by the Pew Research Center. That coverage was up from just 5% in the third week of October. Notably, the euro crisis was the top story on the front pages of many newspapers in the US.
Coverage does not equal public concern. Only 6% of Americans claimed that the eurozone debt crisis was the story they were following the most closely (though that figure was up from just 4% in October). And, to put the media’s and public’s concern in perspective, 17% of the news coverage in the second week of November was devoted to a story about a child-abuse scandal at Penn State University. A whopping 32% of the public said this was the story they were following the most closely. Not surprisingly, sex scandals still trump concerns about Europe.
Nonetheless, the figures underline that, after years of inattention, Europe is suddenly relevant again to Americans, for all the wrong reasons. The motivation behind this new interest is purely defensive: how to keep the US from being sucked into a double-dip recession by Europe’s ongoing travails.
After holding no hearings on the eurozone crisis in this spring, Congress has held five this autumn. And, while the initial interest on Capitol Hill has largely focused on averting financial risks, members of Congress have begun to question how the crisis could affect US strategic concerns and what might be done to help Europe re-ignite growth.
Meanwhile, the concern felt by the administration of President Barack Obama verges on obsession. White House officials are convinced that a euro crisis-induced US recession, possibly triggered by a seizing up of financial markets’ lending, could doom Obama’s already tricky bid for re-election.
But do not expect the summit to grapple with the euro crisis directly: it is a largely symbolic meeting that is followed by more technical sessions of the Transatlantic Economic Council focused on trade and regulatory issues.
Expect, however, some reassuring US statements at the summit about transatlantic solidarity in the face of Europe’s problems. And look for a reaffirmation of transatlantic economic interdependence.
The real measure of the summit’s success, though, will be the willingness of both sides to commit themselves to reviving US-EU growth. With mounting public debt burdens and limited room for more monetary expansion, both Europe and the US need off-budget initiatives to revive investor and consumer confidence.
The best way to do this is through more ambitious efforts to broaden and deepen the transatlantic market. There should, for example, be a transatlantic jobs and growth initiative to eliminate tariffs on US-EU trade and to liberalise investment and trade in services, while reducing non-tariff regulatory barriers.
The White House and the European Commission have signalled that they are ready to consider such an effort. If the summit launches such an inquiry and sets a date (say, next May’s G8 summit in Chicago) by which to decide whether to proceed with such an initiative, then this US-EU summit may be remembered as a historic transatlantic response to the euro crisis. If not, it will be seen as a tragically lost opportunity.
Bruce Stokes is the senior transatlantic fellow for economics at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.