Search Results for: France

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union’s (EU) official coordinator for promoting the development of a high voltage connection between France and Spain has outlined four questions about the project that he wants answered by June. Mario Monti, a former EU competition commissioner, has said in a report that a continued failure by the French and Spanish governments to provide firm answers has long delayed this key capacity project.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

TOUGH lobbying by European Union (EU) member states wanting to staunch import flows into Europe of cheap clothing, textiles and shoes has prevented the European Commission from reforming EU antidumping rules.

With the outsourcing of manufacturing by EU-owned companies to low wage economies in Asia generating increasing amounts of corporate wealth, Brussels’ trade directorate general has been pushing for more liberal policies over trade protection.…

BY ERIC LYMAN, in Rome

THE ITALIAN tobacco industry is currently in a holding pattern, mid-way between two milestones: the 2005 ban on indoor smoking that had a dramatic impact sales that the industry has yet to recover from, and a change in European Union (EU) subsidy rules scheduled for 2010 that could have a far greater effect on total production from Europe’s largest tobacco producer.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

WHILE most informed people now agree it is important that greenhouse gas emissions are reduced across the global economy, the question about which methods to choose for achieving this have generated far less consensus and nowhere is this truer than with the road transport sector.…

BY Monica Dobie

A Hungarian university has shown that computer programmes and algorithms can accurately classify different types of dog barks, and in some instances better than trained dog lovers, according to new research published in the journal Animal Cognition.

Lead researcher, Csaba Molnár and his team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary analysed 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs in six different situations: ‘stranger’, ‘fight’, ‘walk’, ‘alone’, ‘ball’ and ‘play’.…

BY MARK ROWE

RUSSIA has engaged in a series of political and economic spats with its former Soviet satellites and the European Union (EU) in the first years of the 21st century. And while stand-offs over Belarus sugar and Moldovan wine might raise eyebrows in the West, disputes over the vast energy resources in Russia and its Central Asian neighbours carry an altogether darker shade, mainly because Russia supplies 25% of the EU’s oil and 25% of its gas.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union’s (EU) transport sector will be legally charged with helping Europe reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from 2013, should a new proposal from the European Commission become law. Under a tabled ‘effort sharing’ directive, economic sectors not included within the European Union’s (EU) current and future emissions trading regime, should also help fight global warming.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has been approving a series of operational programmes for many European Union (EU) member states’ fishing (and aquaculture) sectors, outlining how it will target money from the European Fisheries Fund (EFF).

One of the largest recipients of this Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) subsidy scheme is France, which is to receive Euro 216 million from 2007-13, less than it received under the 2000-2006 Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance (FIFG), which supplied Euro 278 million.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has highlighted eight member states as having failed to submit national energy efficiency action plans as required by the European Union’s (EU) energy services directive. Legal action has already been launched against 10 member states – but two of these (Belgium and Slovakia) submitted action plans in December.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

RUSSIA and eastern European countries will be eager consumers of car rental and company fleet leasing services in the next few years but would-be players in these markets should know that a slew of administrative problems, supply delays and tax complications may await them.…