Archive
International News Services archives articles supplied to clients one year or more after initial publication. These articles are protected by a password and not made available to readers without permission from clients. They are used as a background resource by agency journalists. Upon client requests, International News Services will remove such articles from the archive or not upload them in the first place. They are included to demonstrate the breadth of topics undertaken by the agency and also to help promote clients’ coverage.
SINGLE SKY FEATURE
BY MARK ROWE
CAN the European Union’s single skies plan become a reality inside 30 months? It is a topical subject, with the recent crash over Germany underlining the arguments in favour and against the project, which should lead to planes flying above 28,000 feet being guided and controlled by unified units of air traffic controllers, replacing the current piecemeal system of national flight monitoring and guidance.…
SOMALIA
Keith Nuthall
THE INTERNATIONAL Maritime Bureau is warning ships captains to avoid the Somalia coast because of the risk of attacks by pirates and kidnappers. The piracy-fighting arm of the International Chamber of Commerce has warned: “Ships unlucky enough to develop engine trouble after straying too close to the shores of Somalia are virtually certain to fall victim to armed gangs who will extort a stiff ransom from the owners.”…
NETHERLANDS STATE AID
Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has ordered the Dutch government recover maritime transport aid it has paid out since 1996 to port and inland waterway towage operations, ruling that these payments broke EU state aid rules. Brussels approved subsidies from the Netherlands to towage operators, but had assumed that this money was for limited to ships working on the open seas.…
ANTARCTICA
Keith Nuthall
THE BIG fear of environmentalists, that global warming is melting the world’s ice caps, is maybe not true after all, at least this year, with European Space Agency surveys showing that pack ice has been unusually heavy in the Antarctic sea, trapping ships trying to deliver supplies to polar scientific bases.…
RUSSIA SHELF
Keith Nuthall
RUSSIA has been advised, in secret, by the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf about whether it can claim maritime territory in the Pacific and the Arctic, enabling it to control the North Pole.
The UN agency has been studying geological claims lodged by Moscow that wide swathes of the Arctic Ocean are part of Russia’s ‘continental shelf,’ areas of sea that are shallow enough or contain enough sedimentary rocks to be legally defined as national territory under international law.…
SPACE TARP
KEITH NUTHALL
SPINOFF technology from the European Space Agency has been used to create knitted steel flameproof textiles, which have been designed to protect the outside of road haulage containers from vandals. French company Société Ariégeoise de Bonneterie has adapted materials used on ESA’s Ariane rocket launchers, modifying the knitting technique to create a flexible fabric of steel wire that is extremely difficult to cut.…
PUBLIC CONSULTATION
BY KEITH NUTHALL
A SERIES of rounds of public consultation has been launched by the European Commission on detailed guidelines for clinical trials on medicinal products. These include rules on good clinical practice, ethics committee procedures, authorisation requests, making amendments to applications and guidance on the collection, verification and presentation of adverse reaction reports arising from clinical trials on medicinal products for human use.…
MARKETING WITHDRAWL
BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products has confirmed that the European marketing authorisation to Chiron SpA for Triacelluvax, (a combined diptheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis vaccine), has been withdrawn. The drug was only marketed in Italy and Chiron decided to cease selling the drug, as alternatives are available across Europe.…
BELGIUM ECJ
BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has formally asked Belgium to liberalise laws impeding laboratories from carrying out clinical analyses for patients. The Commission wants Belgium to scrap regulations insisting that for such laboratories to receive money via the country’s social insurance scheme, they have to be headed up administratively by doctors, pharmacists or chemical science graduates.…
EIF FUND
BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Fund has agreed to invest Euro 25 million in “Merlin Biosciences III,” a pan-European scheme investing on infant companies that develop human healthcare products or allied technologies. Merlin Biosciences III will exclusively focus on biosciences, with particular attention to post-genomics, cell therapy, computational approaches to biosciences, bionics, nano-technology and system biology.…