Search Results for: Germany

BY KEITH NUTHALL

European Union (EU) member states have agreed a final package of aid to EU fruit and vegetable producers compensating them for lost sales following the German e-coli outbreak, with total subsidies Euro EUR226 million.

This is up from the EUR210 previously discussed and will see the EU pay for cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, courgettes, and sweet peppers withdrawn from sale between May 26 and June 30 over E-coli contamination concerns.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A KEY European business organisation has warned that Germany’s planned abandoning of nuclear power could have consequences across Europe, wants the European Commission to assess how the decision could affect the whole European Union (EU).

Employers group BusinessEurope has written to EU energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger asking him to probe the "short- and medium-term impacts…on energy costs, such as for electricity or gas, energy security and CO2 prices in Europe."…

BY MJ DESCHAMPS

WHILE Japanese engineers have built robots over the years that resemble pets, play football, and mimic human facial expressions, when the Fukushima nuclear plant starting emitting radioactivity after the recent tsunami, Japan had to look overseas for robots to help heal the damaged plant.…

BY MARK GODFREY

THE NEW high speed train line linking Beijing with Shanghai has caught the public imagination this year, while the Chinese capital is still proceeding with plans for a second airport. Beijing Capital International Airport (BCIA) ranked second worldwide in passenger through-put in 2010, with 73 million users moving through the airport.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON

A new car-sharing model is being tried out in Germany, which links quality manufacturer BMW with an existing car club to attempt to offer business customers a new concept in fleet hire. Time will tell whether the idea catches on and moves to the UK.…

BY KARRYN MILLER

WHILE the goal for many clothing manufacturers and brands is to gain an international presence, there is a key risk associated with selling the same designs in different global markets – the more far and wide that clothing designs go, the more shapes and sizes they must come in.…

BY PAUL COCHRANE

THE MIDDLE East’s confectionery market (including the Gulf, the Levant, Egypt (but not elsewhere in north Africa), Iraq Iran, Turkey and Israel) was valued at US dollar USD113 billion in 2009, while annual chocolate sales exceeded USD4.2 billion, according to USA-based TNS Media Intelligence.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A EUROPEAN Union (EU) research project is trying to boost innovation in European-made textile machinery, helping small-and-medium sized companies fend off Asian competition. The NU-WAVE project has a Euro EUR2.5 million budget and ends this December.

Its aims to make EU companies’ machines "more flexible, productive and efficient to…cope with highly variable and functionalised textile products", reducing energy usage, noise and vibration, said the European Commission.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A EUROPEAN Union (EU)-funded Russo-German research project has been developing a plasma neutron source using a so-called ‘Gas Dynamic Trap’ to incinerate radioactive waste. Scientists from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (BINP), Novosibirsk, Russia, have been investigating the coupling a sub-critical fission reactor and a DT-fusion plasma device to generate 14 MeV neutrons: the aim to burn and transmutate long-lived isotopes of nuclear waste, including plutonium, minor actinides and fission products.…

BY KARRYN MILLER

IT is a no-brainer that factors such as age, diet, culture, and exercise all contribute to a person’s size; however, sizing research over the years shows that there is a link between how tall or wide a person is and the decade of their formative years.…