Search Results for: Germany

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) researchers have developed new computer test models for assessing the likely migration of plastics ingredients from packaging into foodstuffs, which they say will save manufacturers from underestimating contamination, risking expensive recalls. The EU ‘FOODMIGROSURE’ project, led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging (IVV), has developed mathematical models based on extensive tests using various plastics and foodstuffs: one shows how plastics ingredients move about in plastic; another shows how these substances migrate from plastic packaging material into food at the contact surface; and a third model describes how the migrants disperse in the food itself.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
USED clothing handlers in the European Union (EU) will find it difficult to claim their sorting of old clothes for export to another EU country sufficiently changes the nature of these textile products to confer geographical origin. This follows a European Court of Justice (ECJ) case involving a German second-hand clothes handler Euro Tex Textilverwertung.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels
POLITICAL battle lines have been drawn within the European Union’s (EU) executive body over whether minimum excise duties paid on diesel should be imposed on motorists across the 27 nation bloc. The European Commission’s Laszlo Kovacs, who is the Commissioner responsible for tax policy, wants to hike tax levels to Euro 359 per 1,000 litres by 2012 and up to Euros 380 per 1,000 litres by 2014.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice (ECJ) has rejected five appeals by seamless steel tubes producers, such as oil country tubular goods, against fines imposed by the European Commission for participating in a cartel called the Europe-Japan Club. The ECJ rejected appeals by Salzgitter Mannesmann, of Germany, Dalmine, of Italy; plus Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd and the Nippon Steel Corp.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INTERNATIONAL policing organisations are toughening their fight against Euro banknote counterfeiting, as seizures fall within the European Union (EU), but worries persist about counterfeiting outside the EU. The first International Conference on the Protection of the Euro against Counterfeiting takes place in The Hague, the Netherlands, May 15-16.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
A CENTRAL purpose of the European Union’s (EU) second money laundering directive (sometimes called 2MLD amongst officials) that came into effect in 2003 was to extend to estate agents, along with other similar professions, the anti-money laundering (AML) controls until then had applied only to banks and one or two other financial institutions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
The European Commission has made a pitch for world leadership in the fight against climate change by calling on the 27 EU member states to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20% by 2020. The move is seen as an example to other countries of the kind of action needed in the post-Kyoto period if there should be no further international agreement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by then.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
The long-awaited energy policy package unveiled by the European Commission on January 10th will, as the EU’s competition commissioner Neelie Kroes says, “make uncomfortable reading for many energy companies.” This is not surprising. For the past year it’s been widely expected that, among other things, Brussels would be coming up with a plan for the enforced separation of power networks from suppliers.…

BY ALAN OSBORN and MARK ROWE
IN the space of some five years, biofuels have grown from almost total insignificance in the European Union (EU) to becoming the only practical alternative to petrol as a fuel for motor vehicles and much else – albeit still at a very low level.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE BALTIC States are the European Union’s (EU) boom-region for research spending increases, according to the latest R&D figures from EU statistical agency Eurostat, which show Britain’s performance as relatively static. Annual average growth rates in real terms research spending from 2001 to 2005 ranged from +18% in Latvia, +17% in Estonia, and +11% in Lithuania, (+15% in Cyprus).…