Search Results for: united nations

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE OPPORTINITY for companies to buy efficient robots to tackle unpopular or dangerous jobs is increasing fast, with orders for industrial robots rising by 18% worldwide January-June this year, a United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) report has said.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL and MONICA DOBIE
AT least one million cases of pesticide poisonings occur annually worldwide, killing thousands of people, with children being especially at risk, a United Nations (UN) agency joint-report has claimed.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) say most poisonings occur in developing country rural areas, with poor countries accounting for 99% of these deaths, while using just 25% of the planet’s pesticides.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
REPRESENTATIVES of 40 governments have heard how space technology can be used to boost drinking water quality worldwide. A conference organised by the Vienna-based United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs heard how satellites can aid groundwater monitoring, flood predictions, lake and river water movement assessments, and other key tasks.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Bank has called on emerging market eastern European and central Asian governments not to slavishly follow the priorities of United Nations’ (UN) millennium development goals for health in their region. A new report says these targets “do not address fully the main causes of poor health in Europe and Central Asia, where high burdens of heart disease, lung cancer and injuries reduce life expectancy in many countries”.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
INTERSTATE Bakeries Corp. the manufacturers of Twinkies snack cakes and Wonderbread in the United States, has filed for bankruptcy protection. The company blames its financial woes in part to the low-carb craze.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is piloting the Internet dissemination of market data to Cameroon cocoa (and coffee) producers to see if the information will help them grow commodities mirroring market needs. UNCTAD wants to avoid over supply problems that can deflate prices, sometimes ruining producers.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE LONG-AWAITED civil racketeering trial is under way in the United States, where the US federal government is seeking a record US$280 billion from the American tobacco industry for allegedly misleading the public about the dangers of smoking since the 1960’s.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WANT to sell cigarettes? Go east, young man. That might be the advice that tobacco companies could glean from the latest set of World Health Organisation (WHO) smoking figures. Using 2003 or latest available data, the WHO has collated percentage rate proportions of smoking adults (18 and over), compared with total populations of all but 56 countries: the overwhelming majority of nations.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
TINY, mountainous and very very friendly to rich people with plenty of cash to stash away, Andorra ought to be a money launderer’s paradise. On balance, anti money laundering people say that it is not, though the relentless culture of secrecy about financial matters makes this impossible to say with certainty.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned against rich countries erecting “a plethora of protectionist non-tariff barriers” to defend their textile industries after January’s quota abolition. Although this UN agency accepts the need for smaller developing countries facing the full onslaught of Chinese competition to have “special adjustment measures” such as rules of origin and “improved preferential access”, it wants this assistance limited.…