Search Results for: united nations

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKE
THE AIRPORTS Authority of India has granted a 10-year licence to an international consortium to provide ground and passenger handling services at four of the country’s busiest airports, namely New Delhi, Mumbai (Bombay), Chennai (Madras) and Trivandrum.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has tried to make up for its failure to strike fishing access deal with Morocco by forging an improved agreement with its north African neighbour Mauritania which Brussels claims its “the most important with a third country” that it has made.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
DIPLOMATS are working hard to lay the groundwork for the launch of a new general round of trade talks at the World Trade Organisation, when the international commerce body holds its biennial ruling ministerial meeting this November.

By the time trade ministers congregate in Doha, Qatar, it is hoped that the bulk of a deal will have been stitched up behind the scenes, allowing governments to rubber stamp a move into negotiations mirroring the depth and breadth of the Uruguay Round that set up the WTO in 1994.…

BY MONICA DOBIE, in Montreal, Canada
THE GREAT Lakes of Canada and the United States, in particular Lake Erie, suffered the highest levels of pollution in the sixties and seventies, attracting global attention and concern to urgently clean the waters that at their peak pollution levels actually caught fire.…

Keith Nuthall
THE TEXTILES Monitoring Body of the World Trade Organisation has asked the United States to confirm that textile and clothing imports that are to be subject of liberalised quotas, under the third stage of its implementation of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, will be free of visa restrictions that have been applied in the past.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRUSSELS is always looking for big ideas by which it can justify its existence to a doubting public and one of the latest of these is the concept of a European Research Area. This idea is that Europe – with its patchwork of nations and national research units – should coordinate its academics and researchers, making sure that they do not duplicate their efforts, rather dovetailing them with a single European goal in mind.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SWEDEN has been told by the European Commission to end its favourable tax treatment of beer compared to wine or face legal action at the European Court of Justice.

Under the Swedish alcohol tax regime, wine in the 8.5 per cent to 15 per cent abv band bears tax at about four times the rate for beer in the three per cent to five per cent range, even though it has only three times as much alcohol.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AFTER Mexican plantation workers walked off tobacco fields in Ontario, Canada, to protest about the deplorable working conditions, the Canadian section of the United Farm Workers of America has called for the establishment national labour standards to protect them.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
CANADIAN furriers are expecting international demand for fur garments will drive Canadian exports up 10-15 per cent this year, to more than CAN$350-million according to the country’s National Post newspaper.

Alan Herscovici, executive vice-president of the Fur Council of Canada, said fur does not have the negative connotations it used to.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations World Food Programme has launched an unprecedented health awareness campaign to persuade Ethiopian truckers to reduce their sexual promiscuity, because of the risk that they will be struck down by AIDS.

The programme will focus on the 2,300 Ethiopian truck drivers that it has hired to deliver relief food from the port of Djibouti to the interior of their war and drought ravaged country, which is also a centre of AIDS infection; estimates say that 10.6 per cent of the population is HIV positive.…