The Sellafield nuclear plant has been evacuated after 'elevated levels of radioactivity' were detected.

All non-essential staff have been told to stay at home following problems at the site in Cumbria, which is the biggest nuclear site in the UK.

Sellafield said an increase in levels of background radiation had been enough to trigger sensors but all processing plants and storage tanks were operating normally.

It is understood such incidents are rare. It said in a statement: "As a result of a conservative and prudent decision, the Sellafield site is operating normally but with reduced manning levels today.

This follows the detection of elevated levels of radioactivity at one of the on-site radiation monitors at the north end of the site.

"Essential workers only are being asked to report for work.

"Levels of radioactivity detected are above naturally occurring radiation but well below that which would call for any actions to be taken by the workforce on or off the site.

"The site is at normal status and employees and operational plants are continuing to operate as investigations continue. All our facilities have positively confirmed there are no abnormal conditions and are operating normally."

One worker said an air sampler on a perimeter fence had detected a problem, which led to all non-essential staff being told to stay away. He said employees had not been given any details of what had happened at Sellafield. He estimated that thousands of workers were affected. It is understood nothing has been detected inside the plant. There was speculation that safety staff were checking to see if there was a malfunction in the air sampler.

BRUSSELS - An “overwhelming majority” of EU countries believe the time is not right to talk of sanctions on Ukraine.  European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso (r), met Ukrainian pop star and opposition activist Ruslana in Brussels last Monday (Photo: ec.europa.eu)  Lithuania was the only one who said the EU foreign service should draft a list of potential sanctions at a meeting of the bloc’s Political and Security Committee in Brussels on Thursday.  The rest followed Germany’s line that EU diplomacy should concentrate on stopping violence instead. “The overall assessment is that at this stage precedence should be given to diplomatic engagement,” one EU contact noted.  “There was overwhelming support for engagement. The situation is not black and white. It’s very complex and we have to take things forward in a way to end violence, so that no more people are killed,” the EU diplomat added.  The source said that Ukraine is split between western Ukraine, where there is greater support for the opposition, and eastern Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych’s heartland, where he still has support.  “The solution must meet the aspirations of all the people,” the contact noted  The internal EU debate comes amid renewed threats by Yanukovych’s security chiefs to use force.  "The events of the last days in the Ukrainian capital have shown that our attempts to solve the conflict peacefully, without recourse to a confrontation of force, remain futile," interior ministry Vitaliy Zakharchenko said in a statement on Saturday.   Zakharchenko directly controls Ukraine’s special police units and gendarmes and has the authority to issue them with firearms.  Mark Galeotti, a US expert on security in former Soviet countries, told this website that if he does, the confrontation could easily spiral.  “In the heat of the moment, if an armed policeman is facing molotov cocktails, people equipped with weapons, they might use live ammunition,” he said.   Zakharchenko's statement comes after opposition activists occupied municipal buildings in towns in western Ukraine, highlighting the country's divisions.   It also comes amid EU commissioner Stefan Fuele’s meetings with Yanukovych and with people at the protest camp, or Euromaidan, in central Kiev on Friday and Saturday.   Fuele said in a communique on Saturday: “I have discussed a series of steps to this end, that could lead to confidence building and to a political process aimed at ending this crisis.” His officials decline to say what the “steps” might be.  But Fuele noted that EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton will also visit Kiev next week to show that: ”The EU would remain engaged in this process assisting them in de-escalating the situation.”  In wider diplomacy, top EU officials will discuss the Ukraine crisis at a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Brussels on Tuesday.  Meanwhile, Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azaraov, a hardline Yanukovych supporter, has tried to defend the regime’s actions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.   But, in a sign of international opprobrium following the murders of up to six opposition activists last week, Davos organisers refused to let him enter the congress venue.  He told the FT in an interview at his hotel that outside “provocateurs” carried out the killings.  He also blamed a hardcore of 1,500 or so “ultra-nationalists, xenophobes and anti-Semites” in Kiev for causing last week’s clashes with Zakharchenko's riot police, or Berkut.

The EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, which have already postponed completing their latest review of the economy, signalled that rescue funds will not be forthcoming if Greece fails to implement improved competition rules. Prime minister Antonis Samaras's increasingly beleaguered administration has indicated it will be unable to enforce all of the reforms, going so far as to propose alternatives at the weekend.

The stand-off comes as Greece's highest legal body, the court of state, challenged the country's fragile economic recovery by demanding that the military and police be reimbursed for cuts dictated when Athens signed up to a second EU-IMF rescue programme in 2012.

The ruling, which was leaked before being officially announced, described the austerity measures as unconstitutional.

If enforced, the court decision will throw a wrench in the fiscal progress Greece has made since narrowly avoiding bankruptcy by adding a burden of anywhere between €500m and €1bn on to the government's extremely tight budget.

That, say officials, would in effect wipe out the €800m primary budget surplus – before debt repayments – the government had hoped to post in 2013, its first in years. The data, which is not expected to be officially available until April, had been hailed as a major victory at a time when the unprecedented fiscal consolidation Greece has achieved is having an ever greater toll on society at large. Athens' fragile two-party coalition had promised that at least 70% of the surplus would be used to redress cuts and benefit losses imposed on pensioners and other Greeks worst hit by the crisis.

GDP measures activity, it does not measure wealth. In the post-industrial service based economies of the West I do not believe that GDP figures do anything but give people something to talk about - they are a very blunt instrument to use to try and describe what is actually going on.
I know there is a lot of talk about debt to GDP ratios - IMO a better metric would be the ratio of the cost of servicing debt to total government expenditure.
Also - instead of lumping the whole economy into a single figure I would rather more emphasis be given to such things as the balance between the various sectors of the economy and the Gini coefficients of the workforce. I have often referred to GDP numbers as "tractor production figures" - GDP may have been an accurate method when tractor production was a big part of our economies, this is no longer the case so can we please come up with a different way of measuring what is going on.
After all - policy is decided on such figures....

The real meaning of "globalization" is that the bourgeoisie no longer feel attached to a specific national home, as is more the case in traditional competitive imperialism.

The communist ideal of federation is a unity of self determined states, so for it genuine self determination must exist before you can have genuine federation. Neither the EU or Russia can promise genuine federation, to Ukraine or anyone, because they are not interested in self determination of peoples but in removing national borders to make profits. This kind of global expansion of capital is bound to appear in the guise of far right extremism, both pro and contra (fascists in Ukraine and Greece), because of the kind of unity wanted, which is necessarily a fake, corrupt kind, not a unity for the majority but for the minority (such as those in Davos at the moment). For instance it talks of freedoms, but curtails those freedoms in practice (Cyprus), it talks of the freedoms of the Ukrainian protesters, but not of the Greek protesters, it is selective and always moves to the right.

EOS is a Brussels-based non-profit outfit that represents the business interest of some of the EU’s most powerful and largest security and defence companies.

BAE Systems, EADS, Finmeccanica, G4S, Thales and 38 other companies are listed as members. Collectively, they employ some 2 million people and have cornered around 65 percent of the European security systems market, which they want to increase by exerting pressure on EU legislators.

To some extent, they have already succeeded in influencing EU legislative files and policy initiatives when it comes to EU defence and security strategies.

In 2008, EOS approached the European Commission’s directorate-general for enterprise on setting up an EU industrial security policy. Four years later it became a reality.

It piloted a so-called end-to-end approach to ensure research leads to market development.

The approach is now in the process of being adopted within the commission’s directorate-generals, EOS says.

It also refined the EU's comprehensive approach for maritime surveillance in 2009, initially proposed in 2005, which is now part of the European external border surveillance system, Eurosur.

EOS has had input on the multi-billion euro Internal Security Fund (ISF), currently under discussion among member states, which is designed to help implement EU programmes on internal security and external borders.

They participate in EU-funded research projects on security with the support of departments inside the European Commission.

For instance, they have a leading role in the "Archimedes" project on “innovative security management” and recently began EU co-funded projects on cyber security.

The European Commission is laying the groundwork for a legal challenge to Malta’s passport sale scheme despite red lines on national sovereignty. The EU treaty says decisions on granting citizenship are the prerogative of member states.

But lawyers for justice commissioner Viviane Reding are looking to file potential infringement proceedings on the basis of article 4.3 of the EU treaty, which also says member states must act “pursuant to the principle of sincere co-operation.”

The logic is that if Malta sells nationality to, say, a Russian oligarch, they are, in fact, selling the right to live in all 28 EU countries, putting fellow member states at risk if Maltese due diligence fails to weed out criminals.

EU officials have dug up two files - the Micheletti case of 1990 and the Rottman case of 2008 - in which the EU court in Luxembourg ruled that citizenship decisions must be made with due regard to wider EU law. They note that the commission cited article 4.3 in recent infringement proceedings on tax reform in Hungary, in which Hungary backed down instead of going to court.

They also note that a ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague - the Nottebohm case of 1955 - says that citizenship should only be granted to people who can demonstrate a real bond with their new country, for instance, by living there for a few years before they get their papers.

But Malta is to sell the EU passports after a vetting process of just six months, with no obligation to ever live on the group of Mediterranean islands.

A Reding spokeswoman told EUobserver on Wednesday (22 January) the commission is currently in talks with Malta to settle the dispute in a friendly way.

“She’s not asking to extend the legal power of the commission on who grants citizenship to whom,” the spokeswoman said.

Japan's bold drive to end almost two decades of deflation and economic decline is in danger of stalling this year as the country raises consumption tax before recovery is secure, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned.

"We are hitting a moment of fragility, there is a significant risk that growth will sputter just as it did in 1997 when they raised VAT too soon," said Prof Stiglitz, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The economy is already losing some momentum as the initial "sugar rush" of stimulus wears off. While prices are beginning rise -- with core inflation reaching 0.8pc in November -- this has so far been caused by rising import prices due to a 25pc yen devaluation. There is little sign yet that the stimulus is filtering through to higher wages, the crucial hand-over if recovery is to become self-sustaining.

Prof Stiglitz said premier Shinzo Abe is pursuing a "risky strategy" by raising the consumption tax from 5pc to 8pc in April. The worry is a cliff-edge fall in sales this Spring. "The tax rise has been pre-announced so people have been buying goods in advance," he said.

Mr Abe is hoping that a 2.4pc cut in corporation tax will blunt the shock, relying on a trickle through to higher wages. This could go badly wrong. "If they tried this in the US it wouldn't happen. Corporations would just pay themselves bigger bonuses, and they would probably do the same in the UK," he told the Telegraph.