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Keith Nuthall
RUSSIA has been advised, in secret, by the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf about whether it can claim maritime territory in the Pacific and the Arctic, enabling it to control the North Pole.

The UN agency has been studying geological claims lodged by Moscow that wide swathes of the Arctic Ocean are part of Russia’s ‘continental shelf,’ areas of sea that are shallow enough or contain enough sedimentary rocks to be legally defined as national territory under international law.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE EUROPEAN Commission has approved the development of an international utility Internet service, which will allow water companies to reduce their procurement costs by calling in bids from a wide range of suppliers.

Ondeo Nalco, a subsidiary of the French group Suez, and RWE’s Thames Water are co-operating to form a joint-venture that will offer electronic procurement, as well as information and bid management services to companies in water-related sectors.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL initiative to cleanse the polluted Barents Sea of nuclear waste has been launched, with Euro 110 million being pledged by Russia, the European Commission, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The Barents clean-up will be the first priority project of this Support Fund of the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership; the sea, to the north of Russia and Norway, is commonly known as the largest repository of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste in the world.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A DYNAMIC online forum on European energy policy has been launched by an international consortium; the European Union-funded INTUSER website contains information about current energy issues and questionnaires allowing specialists and the public to contribute to policy debates. The three year project’s website includes special sections on alternative, renewable, fossil and nuclear energy.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL and PHILIP FINE

ALTHOUGH the US knitwear lobby is breathing a sigh of relief over the recently delayed European Union tariffs on knitted textiles and clothing, it is warning that job losses would follow any final decision to go ahead with retaliation to the US steel safeguard duties.…

BY PHILIP FINE

The US Justice Department, on behalf of the country’s Internal Revenue Service, has filed suit against the US member companies of KPMG and BDO International. It says the accounting firms failed to provide the government with key tax shelter information.…

BY MARK ROWE
CAN the European Union’s single skies plan become a reality inside 30 months? It is a topical subject, with the recent crash over Germany underlining the arguments in favour and against the project, which should lead to planes flying above 28,000 feet being guided and controlled by unified units of air traffic controllers, replacing the current piecemeal system of national flight monitoring and guidance.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A FEASIBILITY study has been carried out by the EU’s Joint Research Centre for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to investigate possibilities for incorporating a neutron coincidence counter into the Hybrid K-Edge Densitometer (HKED) to be delivered by ITU under an ITU-NMCC (Nuclear Material Control Centre) contract for the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, Japan.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
EASTERN European countries that built nuclear power plants while under the communist system never thought they would face deadlines for closing them down as a prerequisite for joining the European Union. Neither had they built in the next stage – decommissioning – into the prices charged for electricity in the way that the western European nuclear plant operators had done from the start.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WE all want to eat safely, which is why governments pass laws to ensure that all food sold measures up to minimum standards of purity and quality. But this can be taken too far. If the safety lines are drawn too tightly or in an arbitrary way, they can be a barrier to imports and thus an impediment to free trade.…