Search Results for: International law

BY MARK ROWE
THE LARGEST museum in the world and – arguably – the grandest of them all, the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is returning to its roots. In the middle of a long and painstaking modernisation process, the Russian museum is striving, in addition to the urgent physical restoration required to bring the museum into the 21st century, to recapture the ambience of its Imperial origins, when its vast palaces were the residence of the Tsars.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
UGANDA has launched “MTN villagePhone,” a (World Bank) International Finance Corporation supported joint venture between the country’s leading telecommunications company, MTN Uganda, and Grameen Foundation USA. Villagers borrow microloans to buy equipment allowing them to sell mobile phone services in areas unconnected to landlines.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL Labour Office (ILO) study claims the economic benefits of eliminating child labour would be US$5.1 trillion, seven times greater than the costs to developing countries. Improved education and health would boost incomes if the 246 million labouring children worldwide were in school.…

BY RICHARD HURST, in Johannesburg
THE AIRPORTS Company South Africa has issued two tenders seeking consultants for upgrading the international arrivals terminal and associated piers at Johannesburg International Airport, part of a Rand3.8-billion (US$550 million) upgrade.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has welcomed the decision by the French government to scrap its unlimited state guarantee of France’s electricity giant EdF. The move follows intense political pressure from the Commission’s competition directorate general, which has fought a long running battle with Paris to prise open the French power market.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE BEST place to break the law is where the closest policeman is 100’s of miles away. And where might that criminal utopia be? Siberia, the Sahara, the Amazon? No, it’s the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on the developed world’s doorstep, where fishing crime is becoming a real problem.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Finance Corporation (IFC), of the World Bank, is supporting the commercial manufacture of woven grass handbags in a remote south-west region of Vietnam. It is funding skills training for the local Khmer-speaking of the wetland Ha Tien plain, so that the quality of their grass handbags is high enough to guarantee sales in tourist markets, such as in the regional centre of Ho Chi Minh City.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SPECIALISTS from the Office International des Épizooties (OIE), the world animal health organisation are investigating outbreaks of “atypical” BSE strains in Italy and Japan, to confirm whether they are new strains of the disease. An ad hoc group of experts from the UK, Switzerland, Italy and Japan has been convened at the OIE’s Paris headquarters to review new test data.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has backed the European Commission’s conclusion that imposing anti-dumping duties on Indian cotton-type bed linen is no longer necessary. Ministers agreed to drop a review of the Indian exports, without imposing any protective tariffs.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is taking the UK to the European Court of Justice because the relationship between “registered social landlords” – such as housing associations – and the Housing Corporation is not governed by European Union (EU) public procurement rules.…