Search Results for: Irish

THE DIPLOMATIC stand-off between the European Union (EU) and Russia over their respective links to Ukraine throws into stark light the EU’s desire to secure energy security of supply and to decrease its reliance on an unpredictable Russian government. These needs were reflected in the announcement in October of a list of 248 energy infrastructure projects that the EU wants built in in the next decade, all in some way connecting EU member countries through electricity, gas and oil links.…

MALAWI’S government is working furiously to win back international donor support suspended over a multi-million euro corruption scandal involving dozens of officials and ministers close to the country’s leader, Joyce Banda, southern Africa’s first female president. Bill Corcoran reports from Lilongwe.…

THE EUROPEAN Parliament has voted to reduce the support the European Union (EU) gives to the traditional biofuel sector, backing European Commission proposals to amend the renewable energy directive (2009/28/EC). MEPs agreed that the law should insist that first-generation biofuels (from long-standing sources, notably food crops) should not exceed 6% of EU energy consumption in transport by 2020, compared to the 10% target for all biofuels in the existing legislation.…

COMMUNICATIONS service providers (CSP) look increasingly to managed services for their operational support system (OSS) and base system substation (BSS) applications.

“One reason is that CSPs and operators are gaining confidence in the managed services model,” according to Matt Hooper, chief marketing officer at Warrington, UK-based MDS, a leading technology and services company in this space.…

THE COST of making Bangladeshi garment factories safe would add USD0.10 cents to each garment shipped out of Bangladesh over the next five years, Ismat Jahan, the ambassador of Bangladesh to the European Union (EU) said yesterday.

Speaking in a meeting of the European Parliament’s international trade committee organised to take stock of the progress in Bangladesh following the Rana Plaza factory collapse in April, Jahan said the overall cost of making her country’s factories fully compliant with structural and fire safety rules would be about USD3 billion (EUR2.24 billion).…

THE EUROPEAN Parliament (EP) has sharply criticised Norway for imposing heavy duties on imports of beef and lamb from the European Union (EU), calling on the European Commission to assess possible retaliation.

A strongly worded resolution agreed today (Thursday July 4), MEPs urged the Commission to continue putting Norway under pressure to lift or ease the duties.…

A FINAL compromise on planned European Union (EU) laws on the timing of auditors’ rotation should be somewhere between the two proposed extremes of six years and 25 years, the EU internal market Commissioner Michel Barnier is arguing, as EU ministers and MEPs grope towards a deal on the issue.…

AIRPORTS and air traffic controllers could soon use data generated from supercomputers to solve many of their safety and capacity challenges.

High performance computing (HPC), which makes billions of calculations per second, is already being used by the aviation sector for forecasting weather and in designing aircraft – notably for engines, said Alastair McKinstry, environmental sciences activity leader at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC).…

AN AGREEMENT was struck last night in Brussels over plans to introduce a 95 grams of CO2 emissions per kilometer target for new automobiles sold in the European Union (EU) by 2020. Representatives from the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers thrashed out solutions to remaining disagreements about how these emissions are assessed, long term targets and special exemptions for auto-makers making ultra-low emission vehicles.…

REPRESENTATIVES of the European Parliament, the European Union (EU) governments and of the European Commission reached a deal today how producer organisations can represent beef and veal producers under a revised EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Under the new system, veal and beef producer organisations will be authorised to negotiate contracts for the supply of live cattle for slaughter on behalf of their members as long as “the quantity of beef and veal production covered by such negotiations which is produced in any particular member state does not exceed 15 % of the total national production of each product covered by the negotiations,” according to the agreed legislative text.…