Search Results for: Netherlands

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A COMPREHENSIVE deal over third party access to gas pipelines has been agreed between German joint venture BEB and the European Commission, leading to Brussels closing its competition investigation into the company’s refusal to allow Norway’s Marathon to pump gas into its infrastructure.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GERMAN tunnelling company has developed a boring machine drawing on space technology to include a sophisticated sensor enabling operators to assess oncoming rock conditions whilst drilling continues. Herrenknecht AG, which drilled the Elbe tunnel, has been trialling its new sensor on a 9.8m-diameter TBM shield excavating the Pannerdensch Kanaal twin tunnel near Arnhem, the Netherlands.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is taking France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Austria and Finland to the European Court of Justice for failing to adopt an older (and looser) directive on GM food. This includes rules on post-marketing monitoring, public information, plus labelling and traceability.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SIGNIFICANT problems have been detected by a European Commission study into the implementation of the European Union’s integrated pollution prevention and control directive in seven EU Member States, with Britain being the only country so far found complying.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
NOBODY likes nuclear waste but nobody has yet thought up a universally-acceptable way of disposing of it. This is as true in Europe as anywhere else. It may be fair to say, however, that some European countries have gone further than the rest of the world in drawing conclusions about the future of nuclear energy as a result of the problems caused by radioactive waste.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
THAILAND’S agriculture officials are predicting that their country’s chicken exporters will eat into key Asian and European markets, because of bans imposed on Chinese exports following its recent outbreaks of bird flu. Japan imposed a temporary ban after detecting the virus in Chinese duck products and the Netherlands’ chicken flu outbreak will also boost Thai exports, Bangkok officials say.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament could be heading for a political collision with the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers over the scope of a reformed Seveso II directive, which imposes commitments on industry to avoid serious accidents.

At the heart of the looming struggle is the insistence of MEPs that the updated legislation covers all forms of mining activity, notably the chemical and thermal processing of dangerous substances within mines.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INVESTIGATIONS coordinated by EU anti-fraud agency OLAF led to arrests of seven smugglers for illicitly shipping tobacco from the Baltic States to the Netherlands, where 10.35 million black-market cigarettes were seized. Three Latvian smugglers were also arrested – in Germany – and 4 million smuggled cigarettes were found in Belgium, near 35 tonnes of illicit hand-rolling tobacco.…

KEITH NUTHALL
BRITISH travel agencies are amongst the most productive in the European Union (EU), according to a report on labour productivity written by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency. Its study assessed the added value created by each worker in a given year for a range of industries, Britain’s travel agencies were the second most productive in the holiday industry.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SWEDEN has the highest European Union unit labour costs in the combined tobacco, food and drinks industries, according to a report from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency; its average for the latest available comparable figures (year 2000) was Euro 38,000.…