Archive

JONATHAN THOMSON
TELEMATICS systems are being used by company car drivers to overturn speeding convictions and parking fines, according to fleet management systems provider Minorplanet. A surge in convictions has led many company car motorists to question the accuracy of speed cameras.…

BY MARK ROWE
SHIPPING lines are resisting Australian government plans for greater use of pilots to guide them past the Great Barrier Reef. Shipping Australia Ltd argues that pilots are overworked and that pilots sleep an average of just five hours each day.…

Keith Nuthall
TIME was that the dredging and marine mineral extraction industry was lightly regulated, even in oceans teeming with life companies could plunder the seabed for materials and aggregates without serious hindrance. But now regulators have their fingers on everything, they are even thinking about rules for grabbing manganese nodules from the beds of deep oceans, a job that no company is anywhere near being able to undertake.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
BRITAIN is being brought before the European Court of Justice for its failure to adopt EU legislation insisting on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications of harbour pilots. The European Commission said the UK had failed to put into national law the directive 1999/42/EC and said this was “likely to prove an obstacle to the free movement of workers, freedom of establishment and freedom to provide services in the sectors concerned.”…

From Alan Osborn
The German travel company TUI AG (formerly Preussag) has

acquired sole control of Nouvelles Frontières, a French company also

active in the holiday sector, under a deal approved today (Tuesday 27th)

by the European Commission.TUI currently holds around 30% of NF’s capital

and is now is exercising an exclusive option to buy shares from the NF

founder Jacques Maillot (who has 41.92 per cent) and a number of minority

shareholders.…

BY JONATHAN THOMSON
MORE than 2,000 kilograms of illegally imported food products have been seized at Dublin airport each month this year. The figure has prompted the Irish government to tighten restrictions, including a ban on personal imports of animal-based products from outside the EU and a limit of 10 kg per person on meat and milk-based products from within Europe.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development will soon be inviting bids for contracts to improve Kazakhstan’s Atyrau International Airport. It is lending the airport company US$24.5 million, which will pay for the widening and strengthening of the runway, taxiways and apron areas, plus the replacement of airfield lighting, including floodlighting.…

BY MONICA DOBIE, in Montreal
THE VANCOUVER Airport Authority has won an appeal in the British Columbia Court of Appeal in a case involving local residents seeking compensation for effects of aircraft on a new runway, opened in 1996

Larry Berg, CEO of the Vancouver International Airport Authority, said: “The court has recognised the principle in law that all aspects of vital public works for the community at large are deemed authorised by the government that orders them.”…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
A COMPUTERISED translation tool has been developed by India’s Department of Information Technology, which will allow publishers to scan copy written in one of the country’s varied languages and scripts and translate it into another tongue. Its Optical Character Recognition scans printed or even hand-written text and converts it into a computer processable format, from which translations can be generated.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
INDIGO Books & Music Inc. and the Canadian Booksellers Association have gone to the Federal Court of Canada to annul last month’s federal government decision to let Amazon.ca operate in Canada, despite regulations requiring a bookseller to be majority Canadian owned.…