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The euro area (EA13) industrial new orders index fell by 0.4% in April 2007 compared with March 2007. The index rose by 2.8% in March and declined by 0.6% in February. EU27 new orders decreased by 0.9% in April 2007, after increasing by 2.7% in March and remaining stable in February. Excluding ships, railway and aerospace equipment industrial new orders fell by 1.3% in the euro area and by 1.5% in the EU27 in April 2007.

WiMAX networks in Europe are being deployed in most countries using spectrum at 3.5 GHz. However these are mostly confined to offering fixed wireless services. The mobile version of WiMAX is also being deployed at 3.5 GHz and has been trialed in The Netherlands using 2.6 GHz spectrum.

Parliament and the Council agreed a deal on the third rail package after Council accepted the EP's final demand for a review every five years of any exemptions Member States grant their domestic railway networks from the rules on passenger rights. This agreement also allows the other parts of the package - on liberalising the rail market and the certification of train drivers - to come into force.

The European bioinformatics industry is competing in a growing market, which is dominated by a few large vendors. Bioinformatics has varied applications in the drug discovery market, including proteomic, genomic and information manipulation applications. Most of the life sciences organisations involved in the process of drug discovery adopt bioinformatics in varying degrees in their routine process. Accordingly, the growth rates in the bioinformatics market are modest yet steady.

The European Union (EU) has continued to expand over the years, but adults in five European countries are not convinced this should continue. Two-thirds of adults in France (67%) and over half of German adults (55%) believe the EU should not continue to take in new members. Just under half (47%) of British adults as well as 40 percent of Spanish adults also feel there should not be any more new members in the EU.

The strength and resilience of the euro-area financial system has benefited from generally favourable economic and financial conditions in the six months since the publication of the December 2006 Review. Profitability in both the banking and insurance sectors has been improving and the amount of problem loans has remained low. For the most part, financial markets have been characterised by unusually subdued volatility, credit spreads have remained very low and many asset prices have reached historically high levels. In February and March 2007, the shock-absorbing capacity of the financial system was again tested by the third significant burst of market volatility in the past two years which it weathered comfortably. Improvements in the risk management practices of financial firms appear to have contributed to ensuring that higher financial market volatility did not prevent capital markets from facilitating the intermediation of capital.

Demographic change and population ageing are making supplementary pension schemes an increasingly important way to secure decent living standards in old age. A new directive aims to facilitate workers' mobility within and across Member States by setting minimum standards for the acquisition and preservation of supplementary pension rights.

In the construction sector, seasonally adjusted production fell by 0.9% in the euro area (EA13) and by 0.1% in the EU27 in April 2007, compared with the previous month. In March production increased by 0.7% in the euro area and by 0.9% in the EU27. Compared with April 2006, output in April 2007 gained 3.9% in the euro area and 6.6% in the EU27. In March the annual growth was 10.8% in the euro area and 10.7% in the EU27.

The Conference Board announced that the leading index for Spain declined 0.6 percent and the coincident index decreased 0.1 percent in April.

comScore released a study of video streaming in the U.K. The study showed that 80 percent of the U.K. online population (age 15 or older who have accessed the Internet from either a home or a work computer), initiated a video stream in April 2007, compared to 76 percent in the U.S., 79 percent in France, and 70 percent in Germany.