The European Astronomy has received a tremendous boost with the decision to proceed with detailed studies for the European Extremely Large Telescope. The chosen design, a telescope with a diameter of around 40 meters, is based on a revolutionary concept specially developed for a telescope of this size. The decision was taken last week in the ESO headquarters in Garshing, Germany, by the governing body of ESO, the ESO Council, which represents 11 European countries and accounts for most of the astronomical investment capabilities of Europe. The decision to proceed to the final design allocates a budget of 57 million euros and will make it possible to start in three years' time the construction of the optical and infrared telescope. Today's decision by ESO Council to go ahead with the next stage of the design study for a European Extremely Large Telescope is a very exciting one for European astronomy. It's a bold step and it reaffirms our confidence in our ability in Europe to build an astronomical instrument which will be the envy of the world and will be the best such instrument in the world. More than 100 astronomers from across Europe have been involved throughout 2006 helping the ESO project offices to produce a full concept in which performance, cost, schedule and risk were carefully evaluated. ESO's innovative concept was presented in detail at the end of November to more than 250 European astronomers at a conference in Marseille. Their enthusiastic welcome paved the way for the decision by the ESO Council to move to the crucial next phase of detailed design of the full facility. For many years, ESO and its community have been working on concepts of extremely large telescopes with diameters from 30 to 100 meters. At the end of last year, it was decided to now find the one concept we were going to build. We gave ourselves one year for that and I am very pleased to say that we succeeded and now is on its community came with the concept, a completely new concept of telescope, a 42-meter diameter telescope and this is what we want to build. The present concept estimated to cost around 800 million euros is based on a revolutionary five-mirror design. The telescope will be fully adaptive so as to largely overcome the fuzziness of stellar images due to atmospheric turbulence and thereby produce images as if the telescope were in space. The primary 42-meter diameter mirror will consist of 906 segments. It will provide European astronomers with access to a facility that will allow them to do various exciting research projects including looking for Earth-like planets around other stars and this is a real quest for astronomers these days. The European Extremely Large Telescope will vastly advance astrophysical knowledge. It will allow detailed studies of objects such as planets around other stars, the first object in the universe, supermassive black holes and the nature and distribution of the dark matter and dark energy which dominate the universe. The European Extremely Large Telescope project will maintain and reinforce Europe's position at the forefront of astrophysical research which was gained in large part through the ESO very large telescope facility at the turn of the century. In the next three years we will be doing a very detailed study of the telescope. At the end of these three years we will know exactly how everything is going to be built and we will also know in better detail than now how much it will cost. After that we hope to be able to start with the construction which should take us until 2016, 2017 and then we can put instruments and use it.