Search Results for: European Court of Justice

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FINLAND is the world’s most technologically advanced country, according to a United Nations Development Programme, (UNDP), report, which puts the UK at number seven in its league table, also behind the USA, Sweden, Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Space Agency-supported satellite ground station has been helping Canadian fire fighters to tackle a spate of large-scale blazes in British Columbia. The

REMSAT unit is driven or flown by helicopter close to a particular fire, establishing a link with satellite cameras, which beam back accurate one-metre resolution images, enabling fire teams to target their work, including the mapping of blaze perimeters.…

BY JONATHAN THOMSON AND KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Space Agency is embarking of the development of a raft of new challenging projects, all of which are open to British involvement, notably a mission to Mercury – which could use the services of the University of Leicester Space Instrumentation Group.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development is to lend Viking River Cruises US$15 million to acquire three cruise ships to ply the Danube and Volga rivers. The Scandinavian/Dutch owned company is the world’s largest river cruise line with a fleet of 30 ships operating in European and Russian waterways.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has announced that the proposed European Food Authority is to play a central role in the evaluation of pesticide safety, in a speed up the current slow pace by which the EU is checking the toxicity of active ingredients in plant protection products.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has decided to come out fighting in its row with Member States over the liberalisation of energy markets. Calling on EU Ministers and the European Parliament to “rapidly adopt” its March 2001 proposals to completely liberalise gas and electricity markets by 2005, the Commission threatened to use exceptional powers granted to it under EU treaties to pass directives and decisions on market fairness, bypassing opposition from national governments and MEPs.…

Keith Nuthall
EUROPEAN bed linen manufacturers have been given six months to request the imposition of renewed anti-dumping duties on cut-priced imports from India, after the European Commission complied with a WTO ruling on the protection and suspended existing tariffs. Geneva had claimed that Brussels had wrongly calculated the duties and EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy has now ruled that there is currently insufficient information on which to base a fresh assessment leading to an immediate re-imposition of the duties.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITISH Sugar, Napier Brown and Tate & Lyle have failed to persuade the European Court of Justice to lift heavy fines imposed by the European Commission in 1998 over allegations of illegal concerted practice and agreements over sugar prices.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
COMPETITION officials are examining a proposed German joint-venture merging the downstream and petrochemical operations of Deutsche Shell GmbH and its rival RWE-DEA. The German Competition Authority has been given the right to adjudicate on the downstream elements by the European Commission, which is itself handling the deal’s petrochemical implications.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITISH restaurateurs and hoteliers could be forced to pay regular fees to record companies for piping music from radio broadcasts into their premises, if the European Commission wins a legal case against the British government.

It has asked the European Court of Justice to order the UK to scrap the existing system, where no royalty fees are paid to record companies when hoteliers and restaurateurs play radio background music, free-of-charge to customers.…