Search Results for: Climate change

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Environment Agency (EEA) has released a detailed warning about the climatic catastrophes poised to hit Europe because of greenhouse gas-related global warming. A comprehensive report collates evidence that extreme weather events are increasing in number and severity, such as floods, droughts and storms.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
POLITICAL change can be like growing seasons, it moves gradually, but in a month or two, the landscape has completely changed. So when the recently appointed European Commission takes office in November, the new commissioners of concern for the farming industry will face challenges unanticipated this summer.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
The European Commission is pressing ahead with the EU’s GRID project by making a grant of 52 million euros to fund 12 new research projects which Brussels said were designed to bring GRID networked computing “out of research labs and into industry.”…

BY ALAN OSBORN
FEVERISH efforts are being made to rescue the European Union’s (EU) software patent directive after suggestions that a number of member states voted for it “by mistake” in May and now seeking ways of reversing their positions. One of those seeking to change its vote – the Netherlands – said it mistakenly thought the measure incorporated amendments approved by the European Parliament which excluded patents for pure software.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
NATIONAL work accident statistics are keenly examined by occupational health practitioners, but they do not enable the safety of British workplaces to be compared against other European countries; that is where Eurostat, the European Union’s (EU) statistical agency comes in.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
MILLIONS more Americans will have to start taking medication to regulate their cholesterol after recent US federal recommendations on new safe levels of LDL, or bad cholesterol, were significantly reduced. A report drafted by the National Cholesterol Education Programme suggests that the target level of LDL, the type of cholesterol that increases the likelihood of heart disease, should be less than 100.…

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
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
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
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”.…