Full Coverage: Northern Europe

26.02.2007 Norway has withdrawn from a controversial scheme that funds consultants to advise poor countries on the privatisation of public services including water, after a damning report by two NGOs.

26.02.2007 Fairtrade is beginning to move from an "optional extra" to a "must-do", Harriet Lamb, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation, will say at the launch of Fairtrade Fortnight in London today, as UK sales of Fairtrade products hit a record £300m a year.

26.02.2007 Britain’s new Freedom of Information Act is facing a double threat, only two years after coming into effect, say journalists and press freedom campaigners.

26.02.2007 As the UK commemorates the end of the slave trade, a new Haitian sculpture will be unveiled today in Liverpool's Merseyside Maritime Museum. It will tour the country, taking in London and Bristol, before returning to Liverpool where it will remain on permanent display in the new International Slavery Museum, which opens on 23 August.

25.02.2007 As the UK commemorates the end of the slave trade, an original sculpture has been commissioned by Christian Aid and National Museums Liverpool from a group of Haitian artists representing their continuing struggle for freedom and human rights.

23.02.2007 Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Development (DFID) Suma Chakrabarti tells The Financial Express in an interview that a political consensus is building on in the UK over committing its Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitment of 0.7% of its GNP. Read on for more.

23.02.2007 A campaign is being organised to pressure British Chancellor Gordon Brown to use his international influence to stop "outrageous and immoral vulture funds", through which companies buy developing countries’ debt cheaply and then try to reclaim much more money when the country is in better shape.
* Stop the Debt Vultures

23.02.2007 Finland’s parliamentary elections will be held on March 18. There are almost 200,000 people with foreign backgrounds living in Finland – but still not a single immigrant representative in the Parliament.

22.02.2007 Authors talk about their new books set during the Bangladesh independence war and the civil war in Sri Lanka, about activism, about Bitch Lit and Les Lit, about forced marriages, plus discussions on The Politics of The Veil and on Brickbats, Bovver-Boots and Bans, as well as comedy, music and poetry. It's the Spit-Lit Festival, celebrating women's writing, London, 2-10 March.

22.02.2007 Illegal genetically modified rice was on sale in the UK more than two months after the Food Standards Agency claimed it had been withdrawn from the market, a court was told yesterday in a case alleging that the FSA failed to protect consumers from GM rice.

22.02.2007 Scottish ministers have announced funding for what has been described as the world's biggest wave energy farm.

20.02.2007 Cancellation of a Guyanese contract with a British water company - apparently for poor performance - underlines the point that privatisation is no solution to the global water crisis, a leading aid policy lobby group has warned.

19.02.2007 Britain must learn from anti-poverty measures around the world to tackle poverty at home, the UK's aid minister, Hilary Benn, will say today. He believes the public's appetite for action has been awakened by recent shootings of youngsters and a UN report slamming UK's poor performance in a table of child well-being.

19.02.2007 Students and young people from Student Action for Refugees will be campaigning against the Learning and Skills Council’s planned cuts to English language tuition and Further Education for asylum-seekers and refugees on 28 February.

19.02.2007 Four leading British charities have called on the British Government to take immediate action to guarantee protection for all trafficked people.

19.02.2007 A British appeal court judge has criticised UK law for ignoring the old maxim - "that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" - and failing to make an exception for acts of terror in a just cause.

16.02.2007 A "public consultation" to determine UK views on the use of nuclear energy was a sham, said the country's high court Thursday, chastising the government and compelling a new review. But the Blair administration appears undeterred in its push for new nuclear reactors.

16.02.2007 Britain is backing an experiment to change the way aid is delivered in parts of Africa that highlights a growing divide over how Western nations spend hundreds of millions of dollars pledged to the continent.
+ How six-mile trek for grain became a stroll to the cashpoint

16.02.2007 from ecolocal:
Edinburgh's new green building code shows how construction in the UK is going to look over the next few years.

15.02.2007 The British Government’s bid to reverse a High Court ruling in favour of Indian Ocean islanders evicted from their homes 40 years ago to make way for a U.S. nuclear base is in its final day.