News from Bill Newton Dunn

Bill tells us that the next EP assembles on the 14th July in Strasbourg. Its first task will be to elect a new speaker. Next the parliament will set up its new standing committees. He hopes there will be a new permanent committee for Climate Change.

Bill also reports that the EU is setting up an "observatory" to gather pan-European statistics on organised crime rather than the current method where each state collects data in its own way. He hopes that the new observatory will reveal the huge and escalating scale of the problem so that the public will push for more to be done nationally and also for a cross-border FBI.

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