Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has authorised the European Commission to open negotiations with Vietnam on updating the 1992 EU-Vietnamese Bilateral Agreement on Trade in Textile and Clothing Products, which was last amended in 2000.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
A NUCLEAR probe developed by Australia’s national science authority CSIRO could cut acid rain rates, claims its inventors. It can detect the sulphur content of coal underground, allowing miners to choose seams with low concentrations of this pollutant.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice has declared that the European Union Council of Ministers made mistakes when it ratified the global Convention on Nuclear Safety. Legislation adopting the treaty should have declared all the roles of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) in these areas to an international depository, said the court, which ruled that the Council had wrongfully withheld some information about Euratom’s safety work.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has admitted that it has never been able to confidently verify whether North Korea (DPRK) has complied with the Non Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement that seeks to prevent the country using its nuclear power plants to make weapons.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WATER privatisation has certainly had its critics, but it has a new supporter in the shape of the European Commission. It has publicly backed the growing privatisation of Europe’s water utilities, with its internal market commissioner praising British government moves to inject competition into its national sector.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN EXPERT United Nations committee has adopted a new global labelling and classification system for chemicals, designed to prevent the mismanagement of hazardous and dangerous substances. The system agreed by the UN Committee of Experts on the Transport of Dangerous Goods and the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals uses universally understandable pictogram-based labels.…

BY DENMARK FINCH AND FRITZ BRETT
INTRO

REDUCING stress amongst employees at work can make a major improvement to the bottom line of companies; indeed, so expensive is the problem, says the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, it is thought to cost the EU at least Euro 20 billion a year in lost time and health costs and affect more than 40 million of its employees.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE HANDLING of dangerous substances at work is to be a key priority problem tackled by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EASHW) in 2003. Unveiling its programme for next year, the Bilbao-based unit’s director Hans-Horst Konkolewsky, said that a European week on dangerous substances would be staged.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THANKS to the rapid development of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) British businesses are adjusting well to the requirements imposed on them by the Kyoto Protocol, the UK Government is claiming. DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) officials say the market has exceeded expectations in volume and smoothness of operation since it began in April this year.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has ordered Italy to scrap a tax break regime for insurance and other financial companies wanting to trade in eastern Europe, claiming that it breaks EU state aid rules. It wants the Italian government to close its Trieste Financial Services and Insurance Centre; this special registration system was one of a number of similar arrangements initially approved by the Commission in 1995, which saw them as offering a way to enhance the development of financial markets in east European countries and the former Soviet Union.…