Search Results for: South Africa

BY MARK ROWE
THE YEAR 2007 will be a significant one for Romania. It is the year that the country is scheduled to join the European Union (EU); it is also the year that Romania’s second nuclear power unit is expected to come on line.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A NEW UN award is promoting developing world sustainability: the Supporting Entrepreneurs for Environment and Development (SEED) Initiative. Winners in its first year included developing the Himalayan Seabuckthorn berry, whose bushes prevent soil erosion, and a west Africa power-plant turning cattle waste into energy.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A UNITED Nations panel appointed to monitor the observance of sanctions still imposed against troubled west African state Liberia has criticised a secret diamond mining deal struck by its transitional government. A UN Panel of Experts said this was with a West Africa Mining Corporation (WAMCO), financed by the privately owned London International Bank Limited.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Bank’s latest global development indicators show sub-Saharan Africa as the world’s laggard regarding the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. For instance, east Asia/Pacific; eastern Europe/central Asia; Latin America/Caribbean; and the Middle East/north Africa regions have moved solidly towards reducing child mortality by two-thirds in 2015.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A MANUAL on handling healthcare waste in sub-Saharan Africa has been produced by the World Health Organisation and the secretariat of the Basel Convention on international waste shipments.

*http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2005/924154662X.pdf…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Health Organisation (WHO) has called for international cooperation on testing potential vaccines for HIV/AIDS because it is concerned that the current boom in research could exhaust available clinical trial capacity. WHO vaccine research director Marie-Paule Kieny (CORRECT SPELLING) has called for trials to be shared amongst a number of sites, each of whom were responsible for testing vaccines on a particular strain of the disease.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels
PROPOSALS for a new European Union (EU) wine regime, which are currently under review, will be unveiled in 12 months’ time according to the recently installed European Commissioner for agriculture, Mrs Mariann Fischer Boel.

In a wide-ranging interview in her Brussels office she admitted that the present arrangements are not working.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
SINGAPORE’S economy is rejuvenating after the horrors of early 2004 when the threat of terrorism (both internationally and closer to home in South East Asia), and then the SARS virus hit the city state hard, shrinking demand for construction and hence the amount of money to be made by the coatings sector.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed imposing definitive anti-dumping duties on imports into the European Union (EU) of polyester staple fibres from China and Saudi Arabia. It has also proposed extending (at a lower level) duties imposed against South Korea in 2000 and scrapping 13% duties levied since 1999 on Taiwanese exporters, who are now dumping at very low levels, said the Commission.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AMERICAN scientists have discovered technology that can detect the sex of insects, helping them to control disease-carrying bugs such as mosquitoes and tsetse flies. Using an agricultural tool normally used to analyse grain kernels, researchers from the federal government’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) discovered they could determine the sex of insects using near-infrared (NIR) monitors, which beam light at an organism, which reflects it back with its own its own unique signature.…