Search Results for: European Court of Justice

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE LOCAL Council – what are the worst images conjured up when thinking of those words?

Let me make it easy for you.

Lazy employees that take forever to process requests, generally unhelpful and bored, unfulfilling positions that can transform a new recruit full of fresh ideas and faith in the system, to the jaded staff that many of us have encountered at our local councils.…

KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union health and safety laws should be extended by a new EU directive to cover the 90 per cent of fishing boats that are currently exempt from them, a report from Spanish socialist MEP Miguélez Ramos has claimed.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE PERFORMANCE of OLAF, the European Union’s new and supposedly independent anti-fraud office, has been criticised by the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee; it has suggested that it has not worked more effectively than its predecessor UCLAF, the European Commission’s in-house fraud busting unit.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH the European farming industry facing more fundamental change than it has in decades, it could be said that funding research into ways of making this transformation less painless has to be a good thing. Whatever the view on this fairly facile assumption, the eyes of the agricultural sector should at least be partly turned on Brussels thus year, where debates for the preparation of a new five-year EU research programme are being staged.…

Keith Nuthall
A NEW power-charging system for electric cars has been developed by a European Commission funded research project. The idea is to set up land-based recharging terminals at that can combine with apparatus attached to cars, leading them to be automatically recharged with electricity when they are parked.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN utilities will be able to apply for grants from budgets of Euro 1.7 billion, which has been earmarked for energy, transport, sustainable development and global change and of Euro 3.6 billion, for information society research – including telecommunications – if proposals from the European Commission for a new framework research programme, are agreed.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Union has lifted all quotas on imports of textile and clothing products from Ukraine, in line with the agreement struck between Brussels and Kiev last December. The move follows confirmation that Ukraine has lowered its tariff levels for EU textile exports.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
VINEYARDS in Kosovo are bearing fruits for the first time in more than a decade because of a joint regeneration programme developed from the Commission, the United Nations and the European Agency for Reconstruction.

In 1990, nearly 10,000 acres of vineyards produced high-quality wine to traditional recipes, 80 per cent of which was exported creating a thriving wine industry in the region.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A ROOT-AND-BRANCH reform of the European Union’s customs administrations is being proposed by the European Commission, to enable officials to deal with the flood of new trade that is being created by the development of e-commerce.

Brussels wants to ensure that customs forces are not overwhelmed by high workloads and are also able to effectively fight fraud.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
CANADIAN farmers are awaiting a Supreme Court of Canada decision, which could allow farm workers in Ontario the right to establish effective unions and engage in collective bargaining.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union challenged the provincial Progressive Conservative government’s constitutional right to repeal legislation imposed by a previous social democratic government in 1995, which allowed the province’s farm workers to unionise and bargain collectively.…