Search Results for: Climate change

BY MATTHEW BRACE, in Sydney

NON-metallic minerals, long considered the poor relations in the extended family of industrial minerals, are suddenly popular again.

They have found favour once more because of their molecular structures and their usefulness in the rapidly advancing world of nanotechnology.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A KYOTO Protocol compliance committee has been launched by the Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat. It will have an ‘enforcement’ branch, able to "determine consequences" for governments breaching Kyoto commitments. A ‘facilitative’ branch will help erring signatories with their problems.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

The European Commission has published a set of recommendations designed to make it easier for economically sound small and medium-sized businesses to change ownership. Brussels estimates that a third of EU entrepreneurs will retire through old age within the next ten years.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg

THE FORTEEN countries of the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group (ESAAMLG) have their AML/CFT work cut out. Under-funded, lacking resources, short of political will and working in a region that leaks money like a sieve…it is a demanding context for the group’s daunting tasks.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg

CENTRAL bankers, drug barons, warlords, corporate bosses and small town crooks in Africa are all washing their money despite attempts by governments and international law enforcement agencies to bring them to book. But financial crime has never been as lucrative as now on the world’s poorest continent.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

INTRODUCTION

THE WORLD’S multilateral food trading system today stands at a crossroads: faced with the suspension of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Development Round, it can either retreat to protectionism, leavened by a series of competitive bilateral trade deals, or it can grasp the nettle of liberal free trade, slash subsidies and tariffs, and then watch the economic rewards roll in.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE INTERNATIONAL Standardisation Organisation (ISO) has released a formal standard detailing how governments and industry should account and verify greenhouse gas emissions, to plan reductions and participate in emissions trading programmes. "ISO 14064 will provide clarity and consistency", said an ISO official.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

OBESITY is a becoming one off the most important public health concerns worldwide and as a result, the best brains of the biggest international organisations have been developing a spate of policy ideas to fight this problem. A key example is the recent European Commission green paper on the issue, which laments the spread of obesity and invites ideas to counter it.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg

ONGOING recruitment of South African nurses to the UK is pushing South Africa’s already hard pressed public health system close to the brink of collapse and putting patient care at risk, the country’s lead nursing union and health experts have warned.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

CEREAL production and prices in the European Union (EU) both slumped in 2005, compared with 2004, according to the latest food market figures from EU statistical agency Eurostat. Faced with a bumper harvest in 2004, producers struggled to secure good prices, even by cutting back on production, a process aided by poor weather.…