The EU adopted over the past decade several regulations to protect the rights of passengers travelling by plane, train, ship or bus. Today it wants to clarify and better enforce air passenger rights and ensure consistent application of different passenger rights regulations in the future.

The European Citizens' Initiative is set to become a reality from 1 April 2012, enabling citizens for the first time to ask for EU legislation on specific issues provided they gather one million signatures in support. In the words of Parliament president Martin Schulz, it is "a wonderful thing", but also a very serious act of direct participatory democracy that comes after a decade-long gestation.

Are European Union countries, still facing economic crises, ready to support the ambitious EU 2020 growth strategy, or will it get tangled up in the claims of member states preoccupied by what they contribute to the budget and what they get back? And, if they do come up with a budget to support the 2020 targets, what will happen to traditional policy areas? These issues will be tackled when the EU negotiates its long-term budget, the so-called multiannual financial framework (MFF) for 2014-2020.

The EP has dedicated this year's International Women's Day to the theme "equal pay for equal work" as women in the EU are still on average paid 17% less then men. Slovakian Christian-Democrat MEP Edit Bauer, author of a report on how to close the gender pay gap, said more needed to be done about this: "Progress is extremely slow".

In autumn 2010 the EU agreed to tighten financial supervision in the private sector in an effort to head off any future financial crisis. A year later the public sector was under the spotlight as the EP tackled dangerous imbalances in EU economies and considered new rules meant to limit the growth of debt and deficits in the member states. On 28 September 2011 MEPs finally approved the so-called "six- pack" of new rules. Read on to find out more about its passage through Parliament.