Search Results for: America

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THREE Belgian brothers – who launched Lithuania’s second largest supermarket chain after the country quitted the ex-USSR – have secured Euro 40 million equity investment by a major US finance house. The European Commission has approved America’s Citigroup Inc taking a minority share in the Ortiz brother’s UAB Palink group.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FORGET about global warming, European scientists are currently more concerned about record low temperatures in the Arctic region, which they claim are thinning the northern hemisphere’s ozone layer to dangerously thin depths. Although Europe, Asia and north America have pumped most of the world’s ozone-depleting chemicals into the atmosphere, it is in the south where the notorious ozone hole has appeared, bringing skin cancers to Australasia and other regions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A NEW banana trade war with Latin America may erupt after the European Commission formally announced that it intends to triple tariffs from 2006 to Euro 230/tonne. Restrictive quotas would no longer apply, however.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AMERICA’S RJ Reynolds Co. has agreed to settle out of court in a dispute over whether it violated terms of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement in California which banned tobacco companies from advertising to youths in publications such as Vibe, Sports Illustrated, Spin, Hot Rod, Rolling Stone and Car and Driver.…

BY LIZ HALL, in Alicante

SINCE March 2005, Operation White Whale, an extensive international anti-money-laundering operation spearheaded by the Spain’s National Police (the Policia Nacional), has produced the arrest of 57 people and the laundering of at least Euro 250 million euros obtained through illegal drug trafficking, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry (Ministerio del Interior).…

BY MONICA DOBIE and KEITH NUTHALL

TIME was when Canadians focused a significant proportion of their habitual condescension towards their American neighbours through beer. US brands were dismissed as weak in alcohol, tasteless and generic. But today, even though the big US beer labels taste the same as they ever did – much to the relief of many consumers around the world, of course – Canadian beer tastes are changing, especially among the young.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
FOR many people, Europeans in particular, Canada represents wide-open spaces, pristine wilderness teaming with wildlife, a high standard of living and a country tolerant of other cultures.

And Canadians are generally a happy bunch, who smugly cherish their social differences with their neighbours south of the border, notably that their high taxes are fair because the money creates social programmes and a national health care system that their American counterparts do not enjoy.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is forecasting a “moderately positive” outlook for European Union (EU) meat and poultry markets, with the industry recovering from its recent BSE, bird flu and Food and Mouth Disease scares. Its ‘Prospects for agricultural markets in the European Union 2004-2011’ report says that the sector is also being helped by Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform, favourable world market conditions and an assumed future return to a stronger US dollar.…

BY RICHARD HURST, in Johannesburg
SOUTH Africa is an emerging economy, neither fully developed, nor fully developing. As a result, there are some rich pickings for commercial criminals, who can operate more freely than in Europe and North America. Richard Hurst reports from Johannesburg.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INSURANCE industry will wait attentively for the responses due in May to formal requests made this week by the European Commission for its World Trade Organisation (WTO) partners to liberalise their financial sectors.

These notes were made within the WTO’s Doha Development Round’s talks on services, which are in technical terms more advanced than the other portions of the negotiations.…