The renewables directive is intended to support an EU target to generate 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2020.

On access to the electricity grid, the draft directive said: "Member states shall also provide for priority access to the grid system of electricity produced from renewable energy sources".

However, documents seen by the Guardian show Britain wants to change "shall" to "may" - which experts say would seriously undermine the directive. Turmes said the original wording was based on a similar policy used successfully to boost renewables in Germany, Spain and Denmark, and was meant to help countries "kick dirty energy sources like coal off the grid".

A lack of connections to the national grid, which was not designed to channel power from the scattered and remote locations that suit renewables, has stalled the uptake of alternative energy in Britain and led to completed wind farms across Scotland standing idle. A recent report from the Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills said 9.3GW of wind power projects were currently waiting to be connected - the equivalent of a new generation of nuclear power stations.

But the strategy also noted that the draft EU directive obliged member states to give priority grid access to renewables, and said the government was working to "clarify this obligation".

The problem here is that removing this obligation will give an out for every idiot government in the EU to make life hard for renewables for another decade or so.

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The first thing to remember in any discussion of "the Danish model" is that it's actually a Scandinavian model, not an explicitly Danish. It evolved in all three Scandinavian countries more or less in parallel. I don't know about Finland, but I'd suspect that they had a slightly different trajectory because their primary trading partner is and was Russia, while the Scandinavian countries were firmly in the American sphere of influence.

The second thing to remember is that the Scandinavian model is not an economic model. It's a social model. The fact that it provides a number of not insignificant economic benefits - such as flexicurity and built-in counter-cyclical spending - is incidental. Nice, but incidental. Because its justification is fundamentally one of social justice, not economic efficiency.

What is usually discussed in the context of the "Danish model" is the labour market model, because it is the part of the Scandinavian social contract that most obviously increases economic efficiency. But as I argued above, this view is entirely too narrow: The labour market structure is a part of a coherent social contract that has evolved as a whole. It is possible that the labour market structure could be taken out of this context and transplanted into other countries with different overall social models. But it's equally possible that it can't. And we don't know, because it's never been tried.

Keeping these points in mind, we can identify six principal pillars of the Danish welfare state (I'll focus on the Danish because it's the one I know, but most of the conclusions should be applicable to all Scandinavian countries and a lot should be applicable to Finland as well):

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Well, as a German, let me point out: it is a holy shrine. Which is why they had it wrapped for 4 years with T-mobile advertisment only to have it reopened by Bill Clinton in front of 200,000 celebrating Berlin citizens. But anyway, anybody who has lived to see the Berlin Wall, anybody who has been to West Berlin while is was an island of hope in an ocean of oppression, knows what it means to be able to walk through it and why it was there that on the night of November 9th, 1989 people stormed the Wall. And it was not because of Ronald Reagan, whose speech is not part of the collective German memory.

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After taking office, PM Robert Fico didn't dare to start renationalisation outright, and overall, his government implemented only minor changes to his predecessors' radical neoliberal reforms. However, it seems that with his power now consolidated, Fico felt he has the power to risk some conflict with the private insurers - and conflict there is, one of them brought the government into court, demanding half a billion Euros in damages.

A documentary about them won several film awards recently. The title is "Eisenfresser" ("Iron eaters").

The location is Chittagong, Bangladesh. It is very near in our globalized world.

A big sea-port, long beaches... stranded ships...

Pictures worth a thousand words - Diary rescue by Migeru

President Sarkozy is reported as having told French Politicians at a lunch in the Elysee Palace today that "the Irish will have to vote again".  This runs directly in the face of the Irish Government's request at the EU Council that:

1. The Irish people's vote be respected

2. That the Irish Government be given time to analyse the result and come forward with proposals to address the issues raised by the campaign at the next Council meeting in September or December.

Topical, since Sarkozy is now in Dublin - afew

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The modern large Western corporation and the modern apparatus of socialist planning are variant accommodations to the same need. It is open to every free-born man to dislike this accommodation. But he must direct his attack to the cause. He must not ask that jet aircraft, nuclear power plants or even the modern automobile in its modern volume be produced by firms that are subject to unfixed prices and unmanaged demand. He must ask, as just noted, that they not be produced.

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