The EU and a tiny bit of other news...

So the EU. Modern Europe. Basically a big members club with plenty of perks and a whole load of rules. Signing up to the EU requires a country to do things like switch over to the metric measurement system and (in most cases) convert their currency to the Euro.

It all gets quite complicated and political but the point of it all is that it brings us together and makes it easier for us to trade with each other and travel freely amongst ourselves.

There are 27 countries (or member states) and together we make up roughly 28% of the global money pot (or economy). It’s supposed to stop us all fighting - as we have done in the past - by bonding us with money ties. But it doesn’t have a combined army because that’s more Nato’s job.

Sweden, Denmark and the UK are the only member states not to use the Euro. Why? Because we don’t want to and because we are all big and powerful enough to have wriggled out of that requirement.

Using the Euro means being part of the ‘Eurozone’ – and interest rates are set by the European Central Bank, depending on what it thinks is good for everyone as a whole. We say we don’t want to be part of this because these interest rates might not necessarily suit us. Particularly in a recession, we feel we need to keep our independence and the right to fiddle with our own interest rates if we need to.

What is going on at the moment is that countries that have been truly buggered by the recession are being bailed out by the rest of the EU. This has already happened in Greece and Ireland. Portugal could be next.

Richer countries like Germany, France and the UK often end up footing a large part of the bill and we generally resent this. We usually end up biting the bullet though, because if one EU country goes up in smoke, as Greece did for example, it brings down the value of Europe’s money pot as a whole.

That’s Europe and here’s the news:

Rebels in Libya have failed to recapture Gaddafi’s hometown of Sitre. The woman who crashed a news conference in Tripoli claiming Gaddafi’s men had raped her has been captured and is now facing criminal charges for sullying his name.

In Syria, the government has resigned and President Assad looks like he is backing down in response to protesters.

And in Japan, the Chief Cabinet Secretary has said that the Fukushima situation is still “very grave” and that they remain on “maximum alert.” Radioactive particles have been found over Britain but not in harmful levels so don’t freak out.

See you tomorrow.