Sixteen countries, including Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Poland, currently allow victims to sue for damages. However, private lawsuits are rare in Europe because of the disparate rules and procedures in the different countries.

Unrecovered damages of infringements of EU antitrust law amount to over €20 billion a year, according to an estimate by the European Commission three years ago.

The draft proposal by the European Commission sets common standards and minimum requirements for the EU, a Commission document obtained by Reuters said.

Oil price reporting agencies were already under renewed scrutiny after European authorities raided the London office of lead price publisher Platts - a unit of McGraw Hill - as well as oil majors BP, Shell and Statoil , saying they suspected oil prices had been manipulated (see background).

The EU's draft law, which is unlikely to take effect before 2014, proposes that regulation of top benchmarks like Libor and oil be shifted to the Paris-based European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA).

Presenting the award, the chairman of the selection jury, Bernard Vergnes, noted that leadership is a complex and multifaceted concept. "We are looking here at someone that people would choose to follow, someone we all would like to play a greater European role in the future," he said.

Respectively leaders of the Liberals and Greens in the European Parliament, Verhofstadt and Cohn-Bendit have relentlessly pushed for a much closer union with a eurozone government and a separate eurozone budget.

Copa-Cogeca, a pan-European organisation that represents farmers and growers cooperatives, said Thursday (6 June) it was evaluating flood damage in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia.

Areas along the Danube in southern Germany and Austria, and along the Vltava in the Czech Republic, are some of the nations' most fertile agricultural and wine-producing regions.

In parts of Italy, Copa-Cogeca said, wheat, barley and oats have been affected and maize and sunflower crops could also suffer.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan returned on Thursday (6 June) from a four-day tour in North Africa, delivering a speech at the airport auguring for further confrontation with the protest movement.

Erdoğan was greeted by thousands of supporters at the airport and his speech was broadcast live on television. In the meantime, anti-government protestors gathered in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, dancing and chanting “Tayyip resign”.

Experts at the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) called for their analysis to be used as an input for the European fracking debate.

Extracting shale gas through fracking is not essential for the German Energiewende, the energy transition policy stemming from the decision to close down all nuclear reactors by 2022, the SRU contends.

The protestors, mainly students and young parents with babies, surrounded the assembly, held back by police and preventing anyone except journalists from entering or leaving the building.

There is public fury over the failure of lawmakers from the country's rival Serb, Croat and Muslim communities to agree on how to draw up the districts that determine the 13-digit identification numbers assigned to every citizen.

The centre-left Danish government, which was formed in October 2011, decided at the end of that year to raise the tax from 5 to 25 Danish crowns (from €0.7 to 3.4) per kilo of nitrogen oxide NO_x emissions. The tax was introduced on 1 July 2012.

The increased NO_x tax was adopted after long debates in the Danish parliament where opposition parties warned it would be expensive not only for companies emitting NOx, but for all businesses.

The German-built Schieborg Delfzijl is one of the first cargo vessels built to comply with the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) standard for nitrogen oxides (NOx), using a catalytic reduction system. The IMO standards apply for new vessels starting in 2016.

The vessel’s catalytic technology uses urea, which is produced from the synthesis of ammonia and carbon dioxide, to reduce nitrogen pollutants. NOx gases are produced from fuel combustion and contribute to ozone and acid raid.

In a report that looked back at the bailout, the IMF for the first time said it lowered its bar for Greece, which could re-ignite concerns about the lender's impartiality.

The IMF said its support for Greece in 2010 was necessary to prevent the nation's problems from spilling over into the rest of the eurozone and the global economy.

"There was, however, a tension between the need to support Greece and the concern that debt was not sustainable with high probability," according to the IMF's evaluation.