Word: belgian
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...country solution for a truly European-based company seems not in line with the idea of a European Union and its legislation," Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy wrote in a letter to the European Commission this week. He is worried about the fate of 2,600 workers at an Opel plant in Antwerp, which is slated for closure under some of the rescue plans under consideration...
...effort to gain operating efficiencies and to outmaneuver rivals, some of Europe's main rail operators are already forming partnerships. SNCF, for example, runs a high-speed Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam-Cologne service called Thalys along with Belgian rail operator Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Belge (SNCB) and Germany's Deutsche Bahn (DB). DB also uses the French company's track to operate its high-speed Intercity-Express (ICE) trains between eastern France and Paris. But, despite their cooperation on some routes, DB and SNCF are locking horns over Eurostar. The French have a majority stake...
Once the Wall fell, those chemical factories were among the first casualties of reunification. Investors such as Dow, Dell, French oil giant Total and Belgian chemical and pharmaceutical firm Solvay moved in, enticed in large part by the subsidies Germany was offering to companies willing to take the obsolete mammoths off its hands. But welcome as the newcomers were, they quickly shuttered the old plants and hired only a fraction of the workers - about 20% of those who had previously toiled at Buna and Leuna. Unemployment soared as high as 30%. People started to leave Halle to find work elsewhere...
...only after Belgian and Italian authorities compared notes earlier this year that Italian officials realized Ayachi and Gendron might have been up to something more dangerous than a people-smuggling scheme. That, Italian investigators say, allowed them to piece together material evidence alongside secretly recorded conversations between the two men that indicated that their intent at the time of their arrests had been to proceed towards eventual terror strikes in France...
...Still, there's only limited comfort to be had from the arrests of Ayachi and Gendron. Because Italian police were not aware of the Franco-Belgian surveillance operation, they had no reason to suspect the five people in the back of the camping car of anything other than trying to illegally cross the border. While police held Ayachi and Gendron, they let the other five go. The French official says the Italians had "no reason not to do what they always do with illegal aliens - they expelled them." The upshot: nothing much is known about the five suspected suicide bomber...