Search Results for: France

BY KEITH NUTHALL

MANUFACTURERS of ‘green products’ can receive special temporary low interest loans from local, regional and central governments over the next two years, the European Commission has signalled. In a departure from standard European Union (EU) subsidy rules, that would ban such payments, Brussels has approved such a scheme in France.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has asked the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to declare that special restrictions on the ownership of capital in biomedical laboratories are illegal across the European Union. In a test case, Brussels is opposing France laws including a ban on non-biomedical firms owning more than 25% of a company operating such laboratories.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

SCIENTISTS in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovenia are mapping the genetic code of superbug Clostridium (or C) difficile to develop effective antibiotics or even a vaccine. The bug is often present in hospitals where it is hard to destroy through disinfection and infections are hard to treat.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EUROPEAN Commission officials have raided a group of companies manufacturing high voltage undersea cables, seeking evidence of illegal anti-competitive behaviour. A Brussels communiqué said it had "reason to believe that the companies may have violated EU treaty rules on restrictive business practices, which prohibit practices such as price fixing."…

BY ALAN OSBORN

STANDFIRST

Every country has its own food and drink regulatory body or bodies: in the first place to ensure that its citizens eat safely and in the second to help safeguard its position in the rapidly-growing world food trade.…

BY WANG FANGQING

THE GLOBAL recession has forced China, whose economy relies largely on exports, to turn to boosting its domestic economy with a budget as huge as four trillion Chinese Yuan – RMB (US$ 585 billion) being unveiled last November by the central government.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A EUROPEAN Union (EU)-funded research project called SonoDrugs has united universities and high-tech businesses in developing tiny, image-guided medicine capsules which could target medicines to where they are needed in a patient’s body. The aim of the innovation is conveying doses through blood vessels to the centre of an infection or disease, after which the drugs are activated by ultrasound pulses.…

BY ALAN OSBORN, LUCY JONES and KEITH NUTHALL

INTRODUCTION

CLOTHING and textile production and trade subsidies are under pressure today, as they have not been for many years. There has been a steady trend towards liberalisation in the sector worldwide, stemming from the abolition of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) in January 2005 and with it, then end of restrictive quotas for imports for the WTO’s 152 member countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A GROUNDBREAKING starter motor-alternator, enabling cars to automatically and smoothly stop and start when in congested traffic, has been developed by European companies involved in the Eureka research network. The i-StARS (NOTE – SPELLING IS CORRECT) project, coordinated by France’s Valeo Electrical Systems, spent Euro 9.85 million on developing this second-generation technology, whose aim is to create significant environmental improvements to auto performance without forcing car makers to make radical changes to engine design.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

CHEMOTHERAPY and radiotherapy maybe effective against cancer, but sometimes they are a sledgehammer to crack a nut, causing patients to suffer from so many side-effects they sometimes wished their tumours had been left alone.

And so it has long been the aim of pharmaceutical companies and cancer researchers to devise means of targeting therapies, so that it is the tumour that gets harmed, while the patient feels OK.…