'Britain enjoying the hottest May since 1772'

Denmark will hold a referendum on whether to adopt the euro and drop exemptions to closer cooperation with the EU on defense and law enforcement, the prime minister said Thursday.

Danish voters rejected the European common currency in a 2000 referendum. The Scandinavian country has also opted out of other key areas of EU cooperation.

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a news conference it was time to reassess those exemptions, which Denmark was granted in the early 1990s.

"A lot has changed since," he said. "It is the right time to take a decision."

No date was set for a vote but it would be held during the next four years, said the prime minister, whose center-right government was re-elected last week.

It was not immediately clear whether there would be a separate vote for each of the exemptions.

Danes stunned fellow EU nations in 1992 by rejecting the Maastricht treaty on closer European cooperation.

A year later, Danish voters approved a revised treaty with clauses letting the Scandinavian country stay outside a single currency and banking system and refrain from joining a European defense structure or conform to EU citizenship laws and common law enforcement.

"We have always said that the Danish exemptions are a hindrance for Denmark," said Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark's prime minister since 2001.

He said the referendum would be held after Denmark had ratified the new EU reform treaty, which includes changes in decision-making rules designed to make the union function more effectively. The treaty replaces the failed EU constitution, which was rejected two years ago.

Fogh Rasmussen's Liberal-Conservative coalition won the Nov. 13 snap election with support from its nationalist ally, the Danish People's Party, and a smaller centrist group.

Denmark, a country of 5.4 million people, has held five referendums on EU-related issues since it joined the bloc in 1973.

In the latest one, on Sept. 28, 2000, Danes voted 53.1 percent to 46.9 percent against replacing the Danish krone with the euro. Recent opinion polls have shown a narrow majority of Danes now favor switching to the euro.

Via the AP

Click to read more ...

I don't believe it!  Victor Meldrew would be beside himself.  I am talking about the analogous reference to Hurricane Katrina in an article concerning the recent floods in South Yorkshire.  This is the third time this week I heard or seen comparisons being made with Katrina: a classic example of our contemporary inability to cope with the slightest aberration to our dreary weather patterns.

How many people have perished as a result of the Yorkshire floods?  Five?  Six?  How many houses have been damaged?  OK, it may run into several hundred properties but by no stretch of the imagination should the damage be compared to what struck the United States two years ago.  1,800 people lost their lives; 80% of the city of New Orleans was under water and devastation was wreaked over a 100-mile radius from the eye of the storm.  I am considerably less than 100 miles from either Sheffield or Hull and none of the houses near me have roofs protruding from stagnant reservoirs of polluted water.

I have raged against the propensity of the British people to take a comparatively minor meteorological freak and turn it into a banner headline of cataclysmic connotations.  It's about time we had some perspective on our weather in this country.

It's raining again.  Water is pouring down the side of my lounge window as I type this.  About 30 minutes ago my neighbour attempted to mow the lawn, but was forced to abandon his efforts after the onset of another deluge.  I suppose with his mower being electric he didn't want to end up looking like that janitor in the film Coma.

Sprotborough and Toll Bar, two villages on the other side of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, have been under water for the past two weeks.  Catcliffe, near Sheffield, has levels of sewage in the street that wouldn't look out of place in Calcutta.  Overnight the villages around Skipton in North Yorkshire, 30 minutes from my front door, have also been badly affected by torrential downpours.  I also have an uncle who lives in Cononley - who hasn't been flooded, thankfully.

Click to read more ...

Can there be a country more pathetic when it comes to weather than Britain?  I have to ask because in other countries that have extremes of weather - be it hot or cold - the locals just get on with it.  As I've said previously here we have to dramatise everything and terminologically turn relatively mundane conditions into the 'big heat' or the 'big freeze'.  When we're not exaggerating the bit of 'extreme' weather we do get, we have to invoke stupid old wives tales-type predictions such as 'swallow flying backwards equals the hottest summer for 3 million years', or 'showers in June means a heatwave in December', or some such cobblers!

We had it earlier on this year.  A few days of reasonably warm weather in April and out came perma-tanned Dr Hilary Jones from under his rock of self-idolisation telling us all to slap on the factor 6,000,000 sunscreen or we'd all come down with malignant melanoma.  I was even waiting in eager anticipation for some tosser from the BBC to be pictured standing in a reservoir basin filled with 3 feet of water informing us how we'd all have to suffer from a hosepipe ban this winter.  Sadly, it hasn't come to pass because the country is absolutely awash with rain in another disappointing summer.

They tell us this is 'global warming'!  How about some bloody warming in the United Kingdom?  It all seems to be happening elsewhere.  I am not going to waste my time doubling the impression of my carbon footprint in order to have miserable summer after miserable summer.  As for water shortages - where are they?  I travelled the length and breadth of Malta and didn't see one overground reservoir.  In a country where it rains less than 50 days in the year, how come they didn't complain of water shortages?  Oh, how about an excellent ability to de-salinate sea water?  We in Britain couldn't conceive anything as simplistically brilliant as that.  We just have to tolerate dead brains banging on drought after 5 days of continuous sunshine, or impending dust bowl conditions following ten consecutive days of the temperature topping 30 Celcius.

Let's face it, we have diabolical weather in this country.  Rain, rain and more rain.  Twas ever thus.  Interesting that the weather forecasters have gone strangely silent about boiling hot summers and Mediterranean conditions a decade hence.  Perhaps they don't want to annoy people too much as they sluice rainwater from their downstairs carpets!