Search Results for: France

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FRANCE has lost a legal challenge to the European Union’s (EU) ban on cosmetics animal testing, being undone by their own legal ambition. France had claimed directive 2003/15/EC – which tells member states to ban progressively testing and the marketing of associated cosmetic products – saying the restriction conflicts with World Trade Organisation rules.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE LONGEST collectively agreed working hours in the European Union’s (EU) retail sectors are found in richer western European countries, as well as poorer new member states from eastern and southern Europe, a new study has shown. And Britain, usually attacked for having the longest working hours in western Europe, actually has below-average collectively bargained time at work in the retail sector, noted the European Industrial Relations Observatory, looking at 2004 figures.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank (EIB) has unveiled plans to lend German wastewater treatment operator Entsorgungsverband Saar (EVS) Euro 200 million to extend and modernise its wastewater treatment and sewerage system. The utility serves the ex-heavy industry state of Saarland, on the border with France.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ANDRIS Piebalgs, the European Union (EU) Commissioner for energy, has announced that energy conservation would be his top overall policy priority for his five-year term, not developing new energy sources. The European Commission will this year launch a ‘European Energy Efficiency Initiative’, he said, setting the EU “an ambitious but realistic and achievable target” to save, by 2010, the equivalent of 70 million tonnes of oil per annum, saving the EU Euro 15 billion annually.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has added ‘Alsace honey’, from France, to its list of European Union (EU)-made products whose names are protected under Brussels’ geographical indication register, banning non-Alsace EU producers from using the term.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INSURANCE companies cannot always rely on a key European legal convention to ensure a case is heard in its home jurisdiction, when fighting the claim of a foreign beneficiary about damages incurred abroad, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE GLOBAL sugar industry will scrutinise the text of an appeal verdict issued yesterday (28-4) by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), confirming an earlier decision that European Union’s (EU) existing sugar subsidies break WTO rules. The European Commission has already accepted the decision, which is important, because it will on June 22 publish detailed reforms and EU agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has responded: “I will take account of this verdict when I finalise the reform proposals”.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
ACCORDING to global consumption figures, Israel is the world capital of teenage soft drink demand, with hot weather combined with a competitive market to create something of a utopia for drinks companies. An international survey of soft drinks consumption published by the Economist by 15 year olds of both sexes suggests that Israel has the world’s biggest teenage consumers of carbonated and still drinks, colas, sodas, juices and the like on a per capita basis.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Commission rapid reaction consumer alert service RASFF has warned of the detection of unauthorised colouring annatto/bixin/norbixin E 160b in red palm oil imported to France via Belgium.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is staging a European Union investigation into the toxicity of the food dye ‘para Red’ (p-Red), supported by the development of analytical methods by laboratories from Britain, the Netherlands, France and Spain.…