Search Results for: Australia

BY MATTHEW BRACE
THE INTERNATIONAL trade deal between the USA and Australia – which has been welcomed by the antipodean non-ferrous metals industry – could be threatened by anger amongst Australian sugar producers who have been excluded. They say they may use their influence amongst right-wing and independent members of the Australian senate to stall ratification, in a chamber not numerically controlled by the country’s Liberal-National government.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE, in Brisbane
THE AUSTRALIAN footwear industry is cautious about the new Australia-US Free Trade Agreement. Almost all lines will immediately be tariff-free if the deal is ratified, with 17 products losing tariffs over the next decade. The industry has not yet received the final list of products affected, however.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
AN INNOVATION in optical fibre technology developed in Australia has opened the way for an advance in medical imaging inside the human body, as well as significantly speeding up the capacity of personal computers. The development of hollow optic fibres made from Perspex has been achieved by a team from the Australian Photonics Cooperative Research Centre (APCRC) and the University of Sydney’s Optical Fibre Technology Centre.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
AUSTRALIA’S valuable minerals industry has welcomed the controversial draft US-Australia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which will remove tariffs from almost all non-metallic industrial minerals on both sides of the Pacific Ocean upon ratification. The Minerals Council of Australia said the deal would directly improve its exports of non-metallic minerals such as rutile and zircon, of which Australia is the world’s leading producer.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKE
THE INDIAN government has been pushing Australian coking coal exporters to resume full deliveries to India’s steel sector, hit by these mining companies citing emergency contractual clauses to reduce supplies. New Delhi has sent high level officials to Australia to solve the problem; it says alternative sources of coking coal are unavailable, especially since China ceased exporting to fuel its own steel sector.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
The US Department of Agriculture has launched a US $53-million project to map the genetic makeup of cattle in the hope it will promote human health by controlling animal disease.

The multinational Bovine Genome Sequencing Project will be carried out by universities in the US and Canada.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
Ministers of the 15 EU countries have agreed to a new rule exemption that will allow US wines to be sold in the Union even though the Americans use oenological practices that are forbidden under EU legislation. Similar exemptions have been granted to Australia and Argentina.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has decided that it will not use its international merger control powers to oppose Anglo American’s bid for complete control of South-African mining company Kumba Resources, having examined the two players’ overlap in zircon and titanium dioxide.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE BEST place to break the law is where the closest policeman is 100’s of miles away. And where might that criminal utopia be? Siberia, the Sahara, the Amazon? No, it’s the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on the developed world’s doorstep, where fishing crime is becoming a real problem.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ALL but one of the commonly used forms of asbestos have been added to a United Nations blacklist, enabling countries to block further imports without being challenged in global tribunals such as the World Trade Organisation. Amosite, actinolite, anthophyllite and tremolite were added to the Rotterdam Convention Prior Informed Consent (PIC) list by an intergovernmental negotiating committee, meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.…