Search Results for: Spain

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank has drawn up plans to lend the Instituto Balear de Saneamiento Euro 75 million to improve waste water treatment facilities on Spain’s Balearic Islands. The aim is to reduce pollution in the Mediterranean, improving environment for local residents and tourists, by building new treatment plants and extending existing installations.…

KEITH NUTHALL
INNOVATION from European Union-funded research has continued to offer improvements to the way that EU water utilities work. For instance, the European Commission-funded MicroChem initiative has developed miniaturised laboratory-on-a-chip systems suitable for rapid field testing of water streams. They examine water in tiny pictolitre quantities, flowing through microbore channels produced by photolithographic etching.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FINNISH lawyers are the most lightly regulated in the European Union (EU), according to the surprising results of a European Commission-funded survey designed to promote the need for liberalisation in Europe’s liberal professions. Oddly, Greece, not known for its adherence to EU rules, has the union’s most heavily regulated legal profession; under a statistical indices developed by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Greece has a regulation burden of 9.5, while the laissez-faire Finns score a tiny 0.3.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
LIFE isn’t going to get any easier for hill and mountain farmers if Dr Franz Fischler, EU farm commissioner, has his way. He wants to “de-couple” payments from production for farmers generally and introduce direct fixed supports based on farm size, past output and acceptance of environmental and other standards.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
STREAMLINING, multi-tasking and flexible posting of employees may be important weapons in the arsenal of a personnel team looking at getting the most efficiency out of their company, but managers had better make sure that their policies are legal, not only under national laws, but European law too.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE SPANISH government has agreed to cooperate with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to fight breaches of copyright, especially in digital publishing. A joint memorandum of understanding committed both sides to cooperate over training, publicity campaigns and information exchanges.…

BY PHILIP FINE AND KEITH NUTHALL

NOT your typical activist group, European truffle producers have formed an alliance to promote a settlement of the long running dispute between the European Union (EU) and the United States over a ban on American imports of hormone treated beef.…

Keith Nuthall
PSYCHOLOGICAL harassment in the workplace, especially by colleagues, is the new growing health-and-safety threat in Europe, both as a source of stress and a cause of productivity losses, a European Union (EU) agency’s report has concluded.

‘Preventing violence and harassment in the workplace’ by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions has found that defence industry workers and government officials are most likely to suffer this kind of victimisation, with 16 per cent reporting these problems.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Court of Justice has ordered Spain and Italy to cease banning the marketing of British, Danish and Irish chocolate containing vegetable fat as ‘chocolate,’ ruling that by insisting they are sold as ‘chocolate substitutes’ the two countries are illegally restricting EU trade.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE INTERNATIONAL Labour Organisation (ILO) has highlighted ways in which tobacco companies worldwide ease the pain caused to its workers when they lose their jobs through global downsizing. A recent ILO report, called Employment Trends in the Tobacco Sector: Challenges and Prospects analyses how the use of better technology and cheaper labour in developing countries has resulted in the loss of jobs in richer countries, despite increases in production.…