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EU Parliament Votes To Ban Cloning of Farm Animals
sciencehabit writes: The European Parliament today voted to ban the cloning of all farm animals as well as the sale of cloned livestock, their offspring, and products derived from them. The measure, which passed by a large margin, goes beyond a directive proposed by the European Commission in 2013, which would have implemented a provisional ban on the cloning of just five species: cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses. The supporters of the ban cited animal welfare concerns, claiming that only a small percentage of cloned offspring survive to term, and many die shortly after birth. The ban does not cover cloning for research purposes, nor does it prevent efforts to clone endangered species.
Representatives from parliament will now negotiate with the European Council, made up of representatives from member states, on a final version of the regulation.
This makes it sound like a done deal, but it's closer to a situation where one house of the U.S. Congress has passed a law, and the other hasn't. It might pass, or might not, depending on what the other one thinks about it.
The way European politics works, moves like this require the agreement of both the European Parliament and the European Council. The European Parliament is directly elected, with representation roughly proportional to population, and its votes are a normal majority vote, like in most legislatures. The European Council is a body representing the governments of each country directly, and uses "qualified majority voting", which is a majority vote of countries (one vote per country) but with supermajority requirements on how many people those countries represent. Specifically, to pass the European Council, a proposal needs all three of: 1) a majority of countries in favor, 2) countries representing at least 74% of "voting weights" in favor (roughly proportional to population but with small countries over-weighted), and 3) countries representing at least 62% of the EU population in favor (a straight population weighting). In practice what this means is that at least 15/28 of the EU members have to support it, and the 15 in the majority have to include most of the large countries.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No, humans do not, in fact, require some meat to be healthy.
Sorry, but please don't just make up facts on the spot.
Someone will call bullshit on you.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Stuff and nonsense. A clone of you is simply an artificially produced identical twin (with an age difference). No more, no less. It is no more you than your identical twin would be.