Search Results for: Climate change

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has formally threatened Greece with legal action at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), over its alleged failure to implement European Union (EU) legislation on solvency margins for non-life and life insurance companies. These rules had been written into EU insurance ‘winding-up’ directives and were supposed to have been transposed into Greek law by last September 2003.…

Keith Nuthall
THE USA’s Department of Homeland Security will in future favour fingerprints as the biometric of choice to incorporate into passports and other travel documents, having previously been lukewarm, preferring other images. The change followed a high-level security meeting with the European Union (EU), which wants to use digitally scanned fingerprints to control immigration, as suggested in a recently proposed technical regulation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AUSTRIA should allow women to work in its mines, an advocate general of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has concluded. If approved – as is expected – by the full court, the ruling would be a precedent EU-wide, although Britain has allowed women to work in its mines since 1989.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) has – for a change – some good news to crow about regarding greenhouse gases, with the European Environment Agency (EEA) saying the old 15 member EU’s emissions fell by 0.5% from 2001-2, following increases in the previous two years.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AUSTRIA should allow women to work in its mines, an advocate general of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has concluded. Francis Jacobs said the court should order Austria to change its laws, as they break the European Union (EU) equal treatment directive.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN research network has developed a quality offset press that it claims is flexible enough to thrive in the plastic films, paper or aluminium packaging sectors. The independent EUREKA network’s ‘variable sleeve offset printing’ project had to reduce the cost of machine parts printing variable sizes “as there are no standard sizes in packaging applications”, said a project memorandum.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FOLLOWING the success in collecting data about prehistoric climate changes from polar ice cores, the European Union (EU)-funded PROMESS1 project has collected 500,000-year-old sediment samples from the Mediterranean floor. These, said a European Commission note, “will allow researchers to reconstruct climate variations since pre-historic times, thus providing keys for understanding what is happening to Earth’s climate now…holding (geological) archives of past developments”.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WE don’t need reminding that industry is generally harmful to the environment but less understood is the potentially quite damaging ecological effect of rising agricultural production throughout the world. This theme came through pretty loud and clear at the Consumers, Farmers and Food conference held at the Royal Institute of International Affairs last week (5-6/July), in London.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITAIN has been formally threatened with legal action at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) by the European Commission for being over-zealous in frontier checks regarding private imports of alcohol (and tobacco). Brussels claims UK customs should not confiscate beer, wine and spirits plus even the vehicles of travellers importing more excisable goods than they can consume themselves.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) ministers have rejected calls by the European Commission for EU-wide legislation erecting market barriers against landfilling, such as ‘pay-as-you-throw’ levies. Considering the Commission’s Communication “Towards a thematic strategy on the prevention and recycling of waste”, ministers noted that such schemes have in the past “not always achieved the desired objectives – eg internalisation of costs and effective behavioural change – and can lead to market distortions.”…