Search Results for: European Parliament

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITISH American Tobacco has won a legal battle to secure documents from the European Commission, on the EU Committee on Excise Duties decision that expanded tobacco should attract duty. The Commission fought BAT’s application, claiming that EU committee papers were confidential under EU regulations, because publication would inhibit members from being frank.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL AND ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has taken a significant step towards closing the legal loophole preventing refugees and stateless persons resident in one Member State from claiming social security rights available to EU citizens, when arriving from outside the EU and remaining in their country of arrival.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE SPANISH provinces of Valencia, Cuenca and Teruel have been freed from restrictions on the export of live pigs and porcine semen arising out of classical swine fever, the European Commission has decided. Live pig exports will only be permitted over the next 30 days if they come from CSF-free holdings however.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Space Agency-supported satellite ground station has been helping Canadian fire fighters to tackle a spate of large-scale blazes in British Columbia. The

REMSAT unit is driven or flown by helicopter close to a particular fire, establishing a link with satellite cameras, which beam back accurate one-metre resolution images, enabling fire teams to target their work, including the mapping of blaze perimeters.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A later briefing paper issued by the European Union also confirmed that the accession deal involved China conceding the right for foreign private firms to import silk directly from China. In the past, this has been subject to a state run export monopoly.…

BY KATE REW
AN ESTIMATED 700,000 farmed salmon in Maine have been killed since March this year in a bid to control the spread of a deadly fish virus, infectious salmon anaemia (ISA). It is the first time that the disease has been discovered in US salmon farms although it has already affected both the European and Canadian fisheries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITISH and other developed country exporters will be able to take advantage of lower tariffs and abolished restrictive import quotas in the vast markets of China in future, because of the long awaited decision to admit the planet’s fifth largest trading nation to the World Trade Organisation.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
AFTER 15 years of negotiations, China has reached agreement on the terms of its accession to the World Trade Organisation, thereby opening the way for British accountancy firms to set up shop in the world’s most populous market.…

Keith Nuthall
BACKGROUND

IN traditional ‘old economy’ sectors the malpractice of ‘passing off’ is usually pretty tough to achieve. Setting up a shop or restaurant that looks similar to an established chain can entail a lot of expense and could end in a lawsuit preventing any trading going ahead, and maybe leading to a compensation order.…

BY ALAN OSBORN, in Westminster
THE THIRD annual Information Security Solutions Europe conference has opened at the QE2 centre in London against a background of heightened tensions in the Internet community arising from the terror attacks on the US and a recent world-wide decline in investment in B2B activities.…