Archive

BY MONICA DOBIE
DRINKING moderately every day reduces heart-related deaths in men with high blood pressure according to USA’s Archives of Internal Medicine. A study found that men with high blood pressure who drank one or two drinks per day were 44 per cent less likely to die of cardiovascular causes such as heart attacks than men with hypertension who rarely or never drank.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
HUNDREDS of thousands of American youths too young to legally drink are logging on to websites advertising alcohol brands for entertainment purposes despite measures taken from companies to restrict access to minors, according to a recently released study.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AUSTRALIA’S largest brewers, Foster’s and Lion Nathan, have shifted their marketing focus by spending more money promoting brands for the under-30’s market, rather than their more established lines. According to the Melbourne Age newspaper, both companies invested heavily in campaigns advertising youth-oriented brands in 2003, to curtail a decline in beer consumption due to the popularity of alcopops.…

Keith Nuthall
THE PACIFIC island of Nauru, already ecologically scarred by open cast mining of its guano reserves, has a new problem to content with: its shores are clogged with discarded cans of Fosters and Victoria Bitter. Independent state Palau’s waste disposal systems are so poor, its coast is “blue green”, not from the surrounding azure waters, but from “mounds of discarded Fosters and VB” says the United Nations Environment Programme.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AS PART of its strategy to fight the obesity epidemic in the United States, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is urging drinks producers to include more realistic caloric intake listings on the labels of their brands.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN ADVOCATE General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has recommended that bans imposed by France on the broadcast of alcoholic drinks advertising, especially those on hoardings at foreign international sports events, are legal under European law.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that a drink preparation may be officially traded as tea in the European Union (EU), even when tea makes up a tiny proportion of its ingredients. In a case involving Germany’s Krings GmbH, judges said EU tariff rules do not insist that ‘tea’ must taste distinctively of tea, only a ‘mild’ tea taste.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission will spend over Euro 2.2 million in three years promoting EU wine. Euro 1.22 million is shared by the Union interprofessionelle des Vins du Beaujolais and Deutsches Weininstitut pushing wine in Japan and Euro 440,000 goes to Portugal’s Commissao de Viticultura a Regiao dos Vinhos Verdes for USA, Canada and Switzerland campaigns, for instance.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A WORKSHOP staged by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on the vexed question of improving international market access for African cotton has agreed a checklist of priorities for development aid targeted at this goal. These included commodity price risk management strategies, export subsidisation and diversification into local clothing manufacture, along with cotton production improvements and promoting liberalisation in the sector.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is threatening Spain with legal action at the European Court of Justice regarding its 1987 law requiring labels on textile products to include the name and address of the manufacturer, wholesaler or importer. Brussels says this requirement breaks EU free movement of goods treaty commitments by creating additional costs for imported products.…