Archive

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission today (Friday) made a formal proposal to strengthen its proposals on the mutual recognition of judgments on divorce and parental responsibility throughout the European Union, so as to establish a mechanism for the return of abducted children.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITAIN’S health authorities provide fewer drug addicts with substitution treatment than do a majority of other European Union Member States, a statistical review by an EU drug-use agency has claimed.

The proportion of “problem drug users” given alternative medicines to wean them off their addiction ranges between six and 22 per cent in the UK, taking into account available data, estimates the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and the UN Conference on Trade and Development are developing a task force helping developing countries establish administrative regimes guarantee that locally produced organic foods were made without artificial aids. UNCTAD promotes organic production as sustainable, because its labour intensity and lack of expensive chemical inputs matches poor countries’ economic realities.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Agency for Reconstruction, the EU organisation funding the rehabilitation of former war zones in the Balkans, is spending Euro 550,000 on rebuilding five traditional stone tower houses in Kosovo. Called kullas, they were constructed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are all in a state of disrepair because of war damage and lack of maintenance.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has ordered a feasibility project studying the possible establishment in Brussels of an inter-institutional library for European Union organisations. This would house documents of relevance to the Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and the EU Committee of the Regions.…

BY MARK ROWE
THE LOCATION of Afghanistan’s national museum in a southern Kabul suburb must have been idyllic when it opened in 1931, set against a pastoral backdrop of farmland and mountains. The museum was once one of the richest cultural repositories in the world, home to a collection of the most elegant antiquities from the Ashokan, Greek, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Muslim periods.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SIGNIFICANT changes in the international art market, with possibly adverse consequences for European museums, galleries and other art buyers, could follow from a case being brought by the European Commission against the world’s two leading fine art auction houses, Christie’s International plc in London and Sotheby’s Holdings, Inc of New York.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
ALL 187 Member States of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) have endorsed a global programme to strengthen commercial aviation security on a global scale, primarily through a mandatory audit of national services at a two day High-Level, Ministerial Conference held at ICAO Headquarters in Montreal.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE ICAO security reforms were passed in an atmosphere of some optimism, with industry representatives present at the conference confident that passenger numbers next year will be equal or close to pre-September 11 numbers, with a growth rate of at least five per cent the following year.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE ICAO conference studied air traffic control guidelines in some detail, regarding their potential impact on aviation security. Delegates agreed that that the current air traffic control security standards need to be updated to keep up with emerging threats that may target the navigation systems in particular.…