EU Lays Out Plan to Bolster Defense Industry

The European Union wants to ramp up defense capabilities by loosening its knot of regulations covering everything from sustainable finance to merger enforcement.
The European Commission–the EU's executive arm–on Tuesday proposed a number of changes and clarifications to existing regulations, including encouraging merger watchdogs to look favorably on defense sector deals and signaling to asset managers that some security investments could still be considered Environmental, Social, and Governance financing.

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‘It's inhumane': The airports making passengers queue for up to five hours

Will you be thanking Sir Keir Starmer this summer? The beleaguered prime minister has made much of his diplomatic deal with EU bureaucrats to allow British travellers to use e-gates when travelling to the Continent, thus avoiding unnecessary queues when heading off on holiday. While it's true that some of the more doom-laden predictions of travel chaos after Brexit haven't come to pass, regular travellers can attest to the fact that winding passport queues aren't exactly unknown at European airports. Just look at the recent scenes in Portugal, where British travellers have been left waiting in line for up to three hours in order to show their documents. Faced with a backlash from frustrated travellers, Portuguese authorities have been quick to blame the situation on temporary problems with their security systems. Though Algarve regulars may have noticed that the situation in Faro seems to be a carbon copy of what happened last year, when some travellers reported that only a handful of passport booths were open. So does Portugal bag the dubious honour of having Europe's worst airports when it comes to passport queues? The data on delays isn't fully comprehensive, but there are indicators that suggest that the Iberian nation has some stiff competition on that particular front. A special mention here must go to Brussels Airport, which surely has to take the prize for queuing time – with reports of a staggering five-hour slog earlier this year. 'After a long flight, it's inhumane to expect us to stand for that long,' one frustrated passenger told the Brussels Times earlier this year, in what may have been a deliberate appeal to the EU capital's tradition of protecting human rights. It's true that, as with other European airports, the long lines aren't a permanent feature. But grumbles on social media suggest that they are occurring often enough to cause serious headaches. This has led Belgium's interior minister – the equivalent of their home secretary – to demand that federal police come up with a plan for reducing the queues and restoring sanity. How did things get so bad in the first place? Despite welcoming some 24 million passengers per year, Brussels doesn't even rank among the Premier League of busiest European airports when it comes to passenger numbers. But the city's status as the EU capital, and its historic colonial links, means that it receives a disproportionate amount of flights from outside of the continent, many of which require longer visa checks. That's clearly bad news for British travellers who, at present, have to stand in the same line as those arriving from the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Burundi, all of which have regular flights to the Belgian capital with Brussels Airlines. For an insight into how regularly things can go wrong when it comes to passport queues, just look at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. The granddaddy of European airports might not have it worse than other major hubs on the continent, but it does publish detailed briefings on waiting times and delays. When you look at the most recent incident reports, you can see that the most common cause of passport delays is the most predictable one: a shortage of border guards. Combine that with heavy traffic during busy periods like school holidays and it's not uncommon to see two or three days per month where waiting times spike to around an hour. The data also shows how major sporting events contribute to airport chaos. Last summer, there were queues of up to 80 minutes during the days before the Paris Olympics, as the airport was forced to divert resources to service the arriving VIP delegations. During the 2023 Rugby World Cup, passengers queued until 1am – more than one hour after the last flight of the evening. When you speak to frequent flyers, you'll find that most have their own candidate for the tardiest airport for passport control. 'Madrid is one airport where I've experienced delays,' says Rob Burgess, editor of loyalty point bible Head for Points. Like Brussels, the airport receives a lot of traffic from outside of Europe, with a barrage of direct flights from Central and South America. 'Unfortunately, a lot of the biggest queues correlate to those destinations where large volumes of British holidaymakers go,' says John Strickland, aviation expert and founder of JLS Consulting. 'Right now, Portugal and Spain seem to be particularly bad for long and slow-moving queues.' That's certainly the case in ever-popular Tenerife, where this year's holiday season kicked off with the now familiar tradition of hefty passport queues at the airport. Back in May, there were reports of British passengers waiting for up to two hours in the sweltering heat as families jostled for bottles of water to keep them cool. In response, Spanish authorities have pledged to increase the number of border guards so they can process travellers more quickly. With the school holidays just around the corner, we should see if the plan has worked. In the meantime, will Sir Keir's e-gates deal come riding to the rescue? Not quite. For all the fanfare around the announcement, ministers have confirmed that the current arrangements will not change until later this autumn, when the EU is finally set to unveil its long-awaited digital border system (known as the EES, or Entry Exit System). Even then, it will depend on the discretion of individual countries whether British nationals will qualify for the e-gates. And that's assuming that the system doesn't succumb to technological gremlins on the particular day you arrive. Passengers who arrived at Heathrow or Gatwick on May 7 last year saw the chaos that can unfold when the e-gate system is hit by a technical outage. Until then, hopeful travellers can look on the bright side: data from Paris and elsewhere suggests that 90 per cent of travellers will breeze through the passport gates in less than 15 minutes. Even those smaller airports in the Canary Islands can manage the traffic the vast majority of the time. But for the minority who end up drawing the short straw this summer, it could prove to be a very testing start to their holiday. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.

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🚨 It's official: Florian Wirtz joins Liverpool

The 'Reds' officially announce the signing of the young German footballer who joins the Premier League champions from Bayer 04 Leverkusen. Florian Wirtz, one of the greatest talents in European football, arrives in the Premier League to play for Liverpool, the current champion of the competition, which has made the most expensive signing in history to enhance the squad currently managed by Arne Slot. Advertisement Wirtz, a 22-year-old German attacking midfielder, joins the 'Reds' from Bayer 04 Leverkusen for a fee close to 150 million euros, including fixed and variable amounts, according to the British press. In this way, Liverpool breaks the Premier League's historical record by surpassing the price Chelsea paid to Benfica for Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández (120 million euros). Moreover, the signing of Florian Wirtz means that the current elite champions of English football have surpassed their highest transfer record, as they had spent nearly 85 million when signing Darwin Núñez from Benfica in the 2022/23 season. This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.

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Do solar panels perform better in a heatwave?

The sun is out, mercury is rising and keeping cool is on the minds of most people. If you have solar panels, you might be wondering if the heatwave could hand you a tidy bonus in the way of more free electricity to use yourself – maybe to keep an air conditioner going, or at least a fan – or to sell back to the grid. Longer days do mean more solar power since sunlight will be hitting your panels and generating power for more time. The bad news is that high temperatures can actually lower your generation with solar panels. The good news is that it isn't by much in Britain. Modern solar panels will work from minus 40 degrees Celsius to 85 degrees, according to the trade body Solar Energy UK, and they generally work best at 25 degrees or below. For each degree you go up from 25 degrees, you lose about 0.34-0.5 percentage points of power, depending on the quality of the cells. That means at 40.3 degrees, Britain's all-time record, set on 19 July 2022, good panels were operating at about 5 per cent below their best. In direct sunlight, panels can get much hotter than air temperature, of course, but even at 85 degrees, they would only lose about 20 per cent of their power. When temperatures did hit that record, the commercial solar sector performed well. Over the course of that day, solar provided 8.6 per cent of the UK's electric power needs compared to 9 per cent for the previous seven days, suggesting only a small drop off. Heatwaves in the UK are likely to become longer and hotter due to global heating, according to the Met Office. If you have space to install them, use electricity during the day, own your home, plan on staying there and are up for doing a little homework, then the answer is probably yes. It can take up to 13 years to get a return on your solar panels, but this number can be slashed if you have a south-facing roof, live further south, use your savings to buy them rather than borrowing and paying interest, and use power during the day. Solar panels can also last for 30 years. There are a lot of variables to account for. In the below table, we are using an address in London, assuming a family of three and typical use (no heat pumps, high daytime usage or electric car charging). Other assumptions include no shade on the panels and that someone is in, using power for about half the day and an export price of 15 pence per kilowatt hour. Other than a new inverter, no other maintenance costs are assumed, and no financing costs are assumed. The roof is roughly south-east facing. Much will depend on what price you get for your exported electricity. Tariffs vary widely. If you keep on top of things, however, you should be able to get the 15p per kilowatt hour we use below. Household size System size in kw Array cost Electricity cost per year before solar Savings (energy used and sold from panels) Price after solar (negative means a surplus) Pays for itself after 3-bed 3.6kw £4,990 2,900 kWh @24.5 pence = £710 £540 £170 9 years 4-bed 5.4kw £5,470 2,900 kWh @24.5 pence = £710 £780 -£70 7 years 5-bed+ 9.9kw £7,390 2,900 kWh @24.5 pence = £710 £1,370 -£660 5 years