Search Results for: Germany

BY KEITH NUTHALL

ITALY, Belgium, Greece, Malta, France, Spain, Hungary, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Portugal have called on the European Commission to support poultry producers hit by low prices because of bird flu outbreaks in Turkey and Romania.

ENDS…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission’s food and drink consumer alert service has warned of a spate of contaminations in Italy of various non-alcoholic drinks from packaging print with the potentially toxic isopropyl thioxanthone. Its ‘rapid alert system for food and feed (RASFF)’ has reported the leaching of the chemical into; a banana and strawberry soya drink, standard orange juice, and "red" orange juice that were made in Germany; plus orange juice, general ‘fruit’ juice and chocolate milk made in Austria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has fined 16 firms Euro 290.71 million for operating a cartel in the plastic industrial bags market, in clear violation of European Union (EU) fair trade rules. One British participant – British Polythene Industries PLC – escaped being penalised, along with Belgium’s Combipac BV, however, after they tipped off the Commission about the cartel, which covered Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Spain.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE FRENCH National Centre for Scientific Research is using a European Union (EU) research project on combining computer power through grids of interlinked hard-drives to find a cure for malaria and dengue fever. Dr Vincent Breton, of the centre’s Corpuscular Physics Laboratory, has used FlexX software developed by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, to link computers involved in the EU-funded Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project and told them to focus on these diseases.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has formally approved a directive standardising the protection of groundwater against pollution across the EU, albeit granting member states wide flexibility over the policies they choose. Only for nitrates, pesticides and bio-pesticides will there be common EU contamination levels.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

The Austrian presidency of the EU is calling for a negotiated solution to the Russia /Moldova natural gas dispute reflecting deepening concern in Brussels about Europe’s increasing dependence on potentially unreliable outside energy sources. Russia supplies a third of the EU’s gas imports (a fifth of all gas used in the EU) with Germany, Italy and France the main buyers, though a number of EU countries are critically dependent on supplies sent by the Russian gas monopoly Gazprom through the Ukrainian pipeline: 100% for Slovakia, for instance, 92% for Greece and between 60 and 75% for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Austria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has approved the payment of three national subsidy schemes for the European Union (EU) food sector, using its powers to block or approve state aid schemes to ensure a level EU commercial playing field. It has allowed the payment of GBPounds 2.25 million by the UK government on the Meat Generic Advertising Scheme for Wales, from April 2006 to March 2007.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

GERMANY has been officially condemned by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for failing to ensure the timely implementation of the key EU water framework directive 2000/60/EC by important regions within its federal system. Judges ruled Germany had "failed to meet its obligations" under the law, and told it to pay the costs of a case brought by the European Commission.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission and the Belgian Federal Food Chain Security Agency are investigating the contamination of animal feed with poisonous dioxins, some exported to Germany and the Netherlands. Hundreds of farms have been closed in the alert, caused by defective filters at Belgian chemical producer Tessenderlo Chemie.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

GERMANY is being taken to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for allegedly failing to implement directive 2003/96/EC extending EU minimum tax rates from mineral oils, to all energy products, including solid fuels, such as coal. The European Commission is also formally threatening France with ECJ action for the same reason.…