Search Results for: European Union

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Space Agency has established a data link between satellites using a laser beam to carry signals, the first time this has been achieved. The SILEX system on ESA’s Artemis satellite was able to receive images in real time from the French space agency CNES’s Earth observation satellite SPOT 4, relaying them to an image processing center in Toulouse.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has approved the payment by the British government of Euro 80 million in additional state aid to boost the movement of freight through the Scottish port of Rosyth, in a bid to boost the country’s short sea shipping sector.…

Keith Nuthall
THE US government is likely to be upset by the decision of the European Union Council of Ministers (finance) to approve its proposed new VAT regime for digital products downloaded from the Internet; this system allows EU exporters to sell their goods without charging sales tax, but penalises importers, notably American companies.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Union research project – the Medicago scheme – is trying to discover knowledge about the genes of legumes such as the grain pea to boost their usage in Europe; five per cent of cultivated EU farmland is used for legume production, compared with more than 25 per cent in the USA.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank (EIB) is lending Euro 35 million to the state owned Namibia Power Corporation Pty Ltd. for the construction of 400 kV power transmission lines, supplying the new Skorpion zinc mine in the south-west of the country.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNET legal advice service, providing information about European Union legislation affecting e-commerce, has been launched. The site, eLexPortal.com, will provide updated information on EU and national laws and regulations on the subject; it is free of charge, and allows users to e-mail queries to its online experts.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
A GROUP of scientific experts assembled to advise the European Union and its Member States about the fight against chemical and biological terrorism met for the first time in Brussels yesterday. Their first task was to make a joint assessment of the existing knowledge about the subject in the EU and on the capacity of emergency services to deal with attacks of this kind.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EU transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio has launched an aggressive rebuttal of claims by French trade union’s that the European Commission’s single sky initiative is an effective privatisation of air traffic management that will compromise safety standards.

The conservative Spanish commissioner said: “Let there be no misunderstanding: the purpose of the Single Sky is not to boost competition or privatise air traffic control.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AMERICAN online book retailers are likely to be upset by the decision of the European Union Council of Ministers (finance) to approve its proposed new VAT requirement for books downloaded from the Internet. The system allows for online EU exporters to sell their goods without charging sales tax, but penalises websites based in the United States, (or other third countries), selling to consumers in the EU.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union has bit the bullet and agreed to ban the sales of imported cosmetics tested on animals, not only where finished products have been the subject of these experiments, but also where some ingredients have been assessed through vivisection.…