UK ends ban on TV product placement

Starting today television viewers in the UK are going to start noticing a lot more Coke cans, Sony TVs and Motorola phones in their favourite television programmes – as the ban on product placement is officially lifted in the UK. But it won't be the anything-goes system now prevalent in America - product placement for a wide variety of products including unhealthy foods will still not be allowed and viewers will be alerted by a 'P' logo on their screen when they are watching a show with product placement.

The change in policy follows years of lobbying from Britain's private broadcasters, who said they needed the revenue from product placement to ensure their long-term survival. Product placement has been allowed in the European Union since the Broadcasting Directive was passed in 2007. At that time, most EU states that had bans ended them. But the UK opted to maintain their ban, with Labour's Culture Secretary Andy Burnham saying at the time that the UK needed to "maintain levels of trust between audiences and broadcasters, and protect the standards of broadcasting for which Britain is known worldwide."

American labour fights back

As the Middle East continues to be rocked by protests, in America the Middle West is experiencing its own protest movement spreading like prairie fire. It started in Wisconsin last week, where the newly-elected Republican governor is trying to pass a union-busting bill that would strip collective bargaining rights from public employees. Union public employees - teachers, prison guards, firefighters - took over the Wisconsin state capital building in Madison and haven't left the area since. And the 14 Democratic senators in the state's senate have left the state so that a quorum can't be reached to vote on the bill.

Since then the protests have spread to other states where Republican governors are trying to push through anti-union bills. Democratic lawmakers in Indiana fled their state yesterday to prevent a vote on a similar bill. Also yesterday thousands of protesters converged on the statehouse in Ohio to protest an anti-union bill there. And in Michigan protests broke out in the state capital of Lansing against that state's union-busting bill.

This isn't all part of a coordinated nation-wide union movement. Rather, it is captal-by-capital rection to a coordinated effort by Republican governors and state representatives to introduce bills which they say are needed to balance the state budgets. But these bills also contain, in the fine print, provisions to strip union organising rights from state public employees. They say the state governments, which are largely broke due to the economic crisis, can no longer afford to pay out the benefits the labor unions have spent decades negotiating for. And in large part, they're right. But in addition to proposing to cut salaries and benefits for public employees, the Republican governors and legislators are also pursuing a secondary tactic: strip the unions of their right to collectively bargain, or their ability to even exist at all. And that is what has attracted the protests.

Chaos in EU backyard causing panic

The situation in Libya continues to spiral out of control, and EU foreign ministers are scrambling to figure out what to do about it. After the bloc spent days hemming and hawing about whether it would organise an evacuation of EU citizens, Libyan airspace was closed yesterday trapping thousands of EU nationals in the country.

Now there are fears that the country's erratic and defiant leader Colonel Gaddafi will use the trapped Western foreigners as hostages in what is developing into a tense stand-off with the EU. Over the weekend Gaddafi threatened that if the EU criticised his crackdown on protests he would "unleash a flood" of refugees across the Mediterranean to Italy.

The past few days have seen incredible bloodshed in Libya, where Gaddafi's forces have killed as many as 519 protestors. The Libyan air force is even reportedly bombing the protestors from the skies. Yesterday two Libyan pilots landed in Malta seeking asylum, saying they had been ordered to bomb civilians in the protests.

Who punched whom? Brussels transit hangs in the balance

There are many expressions that expats have come up with to describe life in Belgium, but perhaps my favourite is this: "It's as if someone made surreal a country." No expression seemed more appropriate on Tuesday when the Brussels transit union suddenly called an immediate strike to protest the fact that a metro conductors had been punched by a passenger. But after a day of chaos with the city's entire transit system shut down, it emerged that in fact it was the conductor who had punched the passenger, not the other way around.

On Monday night the conductor got into an argument with a passenger and then throttled him. Afterward, fearing he would get in trouble, he lied and said the passenger had punched him. Upon hearing this, the transit workers union immediately rallied to his defence and that night, just two hours after the incident occurred, called an immediate strike. Every transit worker walked off the job, and did not come back the next morning.

So when I and everyone else went to the metro station Tuesday morning we found it shut - with no explanation. There was no sign, no people telling us what was going on, nothing. I had to go all the way back to my apartment and go online to find out what was going on. All metro trains, trams and buses didn't run the entire day. And with every cab taken, I had no choice but to work from home.

European airports to end restrictions on liquids in 2013

If Europeans were just starting to accept as a permanent part of reality the fact that you can't bring liquids onto a plane, they're going to feel like they've stepped back in time come April 2013 when the restrictions on liquids in airplanes is lifted in Europe.

Yesterday EU transport commissioner Siim Kallas confirmed to MEPs in Strasbourg that the EU will begin the transition back to the era of cruising the skies with as much liquid as you want in two months. The first phase will begin on 29 April this year, when travellers coming from outside the EU but connecting flights within the union will be able to keep liquids purchased at the original airport of their departure in their carry-on luggage. This should end the confusing situation where travellers were being told in countries outside the EU that they could carry their purchased liquids all the way to their final destination, only to have it confiscated at the EU airport they were transferring through. This is only the first step toward an eventual complete end to the ban two years later.

Angela, David and Nicolas agree: multiculturalism has failed

European leaders don't seem to be able to agree on much these days, but it seems one idea they can all get behind is that 'multiculturalism' has failed in European societies.

Over the past few months there's been a torrent of speeches from Europe's most high-profile leaders declaring the European 50-year experiment a failure. It started with Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel, who declared in October in a much-anticipated speech that the country's efforts to create a multicultural society where immigrant groups maintained their own identity and culture had "utterly failed". Weeks later, Belgian prime minister Yves Leterme said he agreed with her and the experience in Belgium has been the same.

At the start of this month British prime minister David Cameron picked up the theme while speaking at a security conference in Munich, announcing in a headline speech that "state multiculturalism" in the UK had failed, and that a stronger British identity needed to be forged and passed on to immigrants. Five days later French President Nicolas Sarkozy, responding to a question during a television interview, also condemned multiculturalism. "We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him," he said.

Yesterday the Netherlands became the latest country to join the anti-multiculturalism club, with the leader of the ruling Christian Democrats telling a TV show that the Dutch model of a multicultural society has failed.