Cloned meat headed for EU menus as talks break down

Three years of negotiations over banning the use of cloned animals for food in the EU broke down early this morning after member states and the European Parliament could not come to an agreement. The parliament wanted to ban meat from both cloned animals and their offspring, while the national governments insisted the ban should only apply to the cloned animals themselves.

Health campaigners have said enacting a ban just on cloned animals is useless because a cloned animal is so expensive to produce it would never be used for meat. The main purpose of cloned animals is to produce genetically superior babies, and it is the offspring that would be intended to end up in your sandwich. During negotiations the parliament offered a compromise to just have labelling of meat that comes from cloned animals or their offspring, but member states said they could only agree to such labels for beef. Beef is already heavily labelled and tracked because of previous mad cow scares. The parliament negotiators said no deal.

EU smoking ban in the works for next year

They've made tenuous moves in the past, but this time it looks like they're serious. Yesterday EU health chief John Dalli told a German newspaper that the European Commission will make a push to ban smoking in all public places, transport and workspaces throughout the EU next year. It is an ambitious idea considering that the status of smoking in public places currently varies widely across the union, and even the United States has been unable or unwilling to try to put in place a federal smoking ban.

Last year the European Commission took a rather half-hearted stand on public smoking, merely encouraging member states to adopt their own smoking bans by 2012. But since then a new commission has come to power and the new health commissioner appears to be more aggressive on the issue than his predecessor. He wants to propose new legislation next year to reduce the amount of nicotine used in cigarettes, make shopkeepers keep cigarettes out of view from customers and enforce new labelling requirements on cigarette packs. He also told the newspaper that he wants to push for an EU-wide smoking ban.