Search Results for: Climate change

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE THREE key international organisations fighting bird flu have agreed a global strategy preventing the disease spreading worldwide and jumping species to humans. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Office International des Épizooties (OIE) – the animal health organisation – approved the plan at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
SMOKING bans can significantly improve the health of restaurant and bar workers according to research performed by the USA’s University of Kentucky. Researchers collected and analysed hair samples of service workers in Lexington, Kentucky, four months before a municipal public place smoke-free law took effect and then three months after the enactment.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IT is an oft-quoted truism that where the money goes criminals follow, and, sadly, this is true of the insurance sector. The industry is not only growing in size, it is offering increasingly complex products and spreading its tentacles into further flung reaches of developing and emerging markets.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THERE was much optimism earlier this year that the European Union’s (EU) revamped working time directive might be finally agreed this summer but it all fizzled out in June and to all intents and purposes we’re back to deadlock again.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has blamed increased coal consumption for electricity generation as a key factor explaining the increase of 1.5% in greenhouse gas emissions within the European Union (EU) in 2003, compared with 2002. The 1.3% increase in the old 15-member EU equals an additional 53 million tonnes; 24 million tonnes came from a 2.1% emissions increase by energy companies, including “coal consumption…growth”.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) has appealed against a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruling that it reverses a change of customs designation for frozen boneless chicken cut imports. The Brazilian government had protested about the reclassification of cuts with 1.2% or more salt content from salted to frozen meat, which attracts higher duty.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels, and KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Commission official has told Accountancy Age that the ‘high level tax group’ set up to consider the implications of the Marks & Spencer tax case may be just “gesture politics”, given the difficulties of making reforms to the European Union’s (EU) court system.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BUCKFAST, the tonic wine that has been attacked by Scottish ministers for promoting teenage drunkenness is facing another political challenge, this time at the hands of bureaucrats in Brussels. The European Parliament is due to consider a directive on enriching food and drink with vitamins and other substances, that would – if passed unchanged – make Buckfast’s existing recipe illegal, along with those of other British tonic wines.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SUDDENLY accountants are being held in unusually high esteem and it’s all because of their work in connection with the relief effort for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami. To date some Pounds 4.7 billion for the stricken countries has been raised worldwide but nothing like that sum has yet got through to the people affected; some of it stolen perhaps and some of it wasted, but a lot of it bogged down in inadequate financial infrastructures: step forward the big multinational accountancy firms who have provided staff, management and professional advice and training, a good deal of it on a pro bono publico basis.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
THE INCREASING global demand for mineral resources – especially from Asia – has breathed new life into a remote yet highly and diversely mineralised part of Australia. The island of Tasmania, off the south east coast of the continent, is revelling in a mining boom, the like of which it has not seen for more than a century.…