Search Results for: European Union

From Alan Osborn
The fashionable term in setting up international energy projects these days is “flexible mechanisms” of which the best known is the trade in emission reductions, or carbon credits. The Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which guides implementation of the Convention, laid down emission reduction targets for industrialised countries but allowed flexibility to meet them through the purchase of emission credits from poorer countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Intellectual Property Organisation’s digital copyright treaty is to come into force on March 6, next year, after Gabon became the 30th country to ratify its provisions, the minimum number required to make it international law.

This convention safeguards the rights of authors whose works are published on the Internet and in other digital media, protecting literary and artistic works, including online books, computer programs, music, art, and films.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank is lending Euro 58 million, (US$50 million), to Vega do Sul S.A., to build a cold-rolling and hot-dip galvanizing plant in São Fernando do Sul, in the state of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil.…

KEITH NUTHALL
EURELECTRIC, the EU power industry federation, has embarked on a sophisticated political manoeuvre to save public procurement reforms to the EU’s utilities directive from being rejected at the hands of conservative and Christian Democrat MEP’s.

Oddly, the opposition of the parliament’s European Peoples Party bloc to the changes is based on an objection that Eurelectric shares; to amendments from the parliament’s internal market committee that would force power corporations to take account of social and environmental concerns when issuing a tender.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
OFFICIALS in Brussels are considering how to avoid the creation of a legal void next July when the European Coal and Steel Community expires and the European Commission is supposed to transfer its Euro 1.6 billion assets and liabilities to the main European Union budget.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE BELGIAN government has been put on legal notice by the European Commission that it could be heavily fined by the European Court of Justice for its failure to abide by rulings made in 1999 opposing Belgium’s cargo sharing shipping deals with five African countries, namely Togo, Mali, Senegal, the Ivory Coast and its former colony, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A FINAL deal has at last been struck over the extension of the European Union’s working time rules to the road transport sector; a conciliation committee representing both the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers have reached agreement over the outstanding issues, notably that of self-employed drivers.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has formally approved new EU-wide rules limiting the emissions of light vans, (of weight categories 1,305-1,760kg and more than 1,760kg), during cold starts. There are currently no European limits on this kind of pollution from these commercial vehicles.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EURELECTRIC, the EU power industry federation, has embarked on a sophisticated political manoeuvre to save public procurement reforms to the EU’s utilities directive from being rejected at the hands of conservative and Christian Democrat MEP’s.

Oddly, the opposition of the parliament’s European Peoples Party bloc to the changes is based on an objection that Eurelectric shares; to amendments from the parliament’s internal market committee that would force utilities to take account of social and environmental concerns when issuing a tender.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development is to administer the closure of a third nuclear power station in eastern Europe; it will manage the decommissioning of Bohunice, in Slovakia, having signed similar agreements earlier this year for the plants in Kozloduy, Bulgaria and Ignalina, in Lithuania.…