In The News: w/e 9th January 2009

Items that caught the eye for one reason or another recently include:

Of Local Interest

It looks like La Bahía in the square is one of the first casualties of the 2009 recession as it has a For Rent sign up at the moment.

While the decline in the value of sterling is posing problems for UK tourists bound for Europe, it is providing an unexpected boon for Northern Ireland’s retailers.

As the pound keeps falling, the traffic-jams keep growing with euro-shoppers coming to Northern Ireland for a Christmas bargain with some shops offering a straight ‘euro-for-pound’ exchange rate, the queues are getting longer and longer.

Some items that caught the eye this week for one reason or another:

Almería to Madrid Train Got Quicker

The travel time between Almería and Madrid has been cut by 30 mins with the introduction of the new Talgo 334 engine, making the total travel time now 6 hours and 20 mins. Based on the volume of traffic (150,000 people this year to date) the time of arrival at Almería has been brought forward to 21.35.

So back in June the Irish voted no on the Treaty Of Lisbon. This was in a referendum where the government let the people decide, only it seems that if you don’t decide the way the government wants then you get to have another go!!!

The value of duty-free personal goods that Europeans can now bring into the EU has more than doubled, under new European Commission rules.

The limit on duty-free goods has been raised to 430€ from 175€ for air and sea travellers.

• A new beer import limit of 16 litres now applies
• The wine limit is up from two to four litres
• The one-litre limit for spirits remains

The Spanish city of Barcelona will host the headquarters of the embryonic 43-nation Mediterranean Union.

The decision was announced on Tuesday at a meeting of foreign ministers from the union’s participating countries in Marseille, southern France.

The union embraces 27 EU states and countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Joint work is planned in areas such as water, energy and education.

Barcelona was the site of a previous EU-led Mediterranean initiative, called the Barcelona Process.

I have written about the Eurozone several times on the site, and looking back at previous posts (just search Eurozone) it is pretty alarming just how rapidly things have gone down hill.

Latest prediction say:

• Unemployment will increase by 25 per cent next year to hit 2.25 million
• The budget deficit will spiral
• The economy will contract by a full 1 per cent

The European Commissioner for the Information Society has said that the retail price of text messaging while roaming should initially be capped at close to €0.11 per message, but then fall toward a long-term goal of around €0.04 per message.

Additionally she (Viviane Reding in case you don’t know who ’she’ is) said “The price of accessing the Internet via a mobile phone while travelling outside one’s home country is also far too high” and warned that if self regulation didn’t work price caps on data traffic may be imposed in coming weeks i.e. soon!!!

The recent strike by fishermen throughout Europe seems to have resulted in some positive action!!!

The EU is to release emergency aid worth up to two billion euros (£1.6bn) to help the fishing industry cope with high fuel costs and overcapacity.

The emergency aid is to be used in part to cut the size of fishing fleets and the time that fishermen spend at sea.

Yesterday it was Spain that ratified the Lisbon treaty, today it is the turn of the UK.

The UK has officially ratified the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty.
The documents were deposited with the Italian foreign affairs ministry in Rome on Wednesday.

This is the treaty that ‘we’ were promised a referendum on remember!!!!!