Search Results for: United Nations

BY PHILIP FINE

THE AMERICAN Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) says growing food portions are contributing to obesity in the United States. While it says individuals bear the ultimate responsibility for what they eat, the AICR has chided food manufacturers and the restaurant industry for distorting what constitutes an appropriate meal size.…

KEITH NUTHALL
AMERICAN health officials have overseen the slaughter of 28,000 salmon on a fish farm in Maine, because of an outbreak of infectious salmon anaemia. Controls were imposed swiftly at the farm in Broad Cove, Cobscook Bay, because the disease ravaged the state’s fish farms in 2001.…

BY MARK ROWE
THE LONG-RUNNING row between Russia and the United States has taken another twist with Moscow reducing the number of its approved American suppliers from 341 to 266. The Russian government cited concerns about health standards in the US poultry industry, the reason for an earlier blanket ban, which was lifted recently.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL Group for Anti-Corruption Coordination (IGAC) has been created by a conference staged by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The new body will be a clearing-house for good practice and intelligence on corruption, to be shared with other UN agencies, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations concerned with fighting corruption.…

BY PHILIP FINE

FROM Gaudeloupe, Arizona, to Duxbury, Massachusetts, and from Helena, Montana, to Loganville, Georgia, US smoking bans have increasingly been finding a small-town

following ; 78 towns and cities in the United States have now enacted smoking bans in all workplaces and restaurants within their municipalities.…

BY MARK ROWE
IN the days of the Soviet Union, many millions of men and women had a choice of one state-manufactured brand of shampoo, toothpaste or soap. If anything, the authorities managed to limit even further access to such “indulgences” as perfume.…

BY PHILIP FINE

DEMOGRAPHICS are changing the contents of supermarket freezers in the US. ‘Ethnic’ frozen food sales reached US$2.2 billion in 2001, according to the American Frozen Food Institute. The biggest growth has been Mexican, which grew 20.6 percent to US$488 million, followed by Asian, which include Chinese, Thai and Indian, up 12.3 percent, totalling US$463 million.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A UNITED Nations Environment Programme report has urged governments to take better care of the underground aquifers that they plunder for drinking water supplies, warning that many countries are pumping groundwater at unsustainable rates.

The paper singles out Spain’s Segura river basin for particular concern.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
FORGET all those stories you used to hear about weak regulation and cosy financial set-ups in Britain’s offshore dependencies such as the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and the crown colony of Gibraltar. They may once have been good places to launder money but not any more they aren’t.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
THE PROSPECT of significant underwater monosite, ilmanite, rutile and zircon off the Sri Lankan coast has attracted the attention of 10 international companies, two from Australia, two from India and two from Sri Lanka. Their applications to mine the 11 heavy mineral seabed deposits, whose estimated worth exceeds US$330 million, are being considered by the island’s Marine Pollution Prevention Authority (MPPA).…