Search Results for: United Nations

BY MONICA DOBIE
PFIZER researchers in Connecticut claim to have developed a new smoking cessation drug that suppresses the desire to smoke rather than weaning a person off the habit by feeding them nicotine. Its scientists discovered a brain receptor that nicotine binds to, designing a drug – Varenicline – that also clings to these neural cells, cancelling and preventing nicotine cravings.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations has suspended two staffers over the Iraq Oil for Food programme scandal, while Secretary General Kofi Annan considers their fate. Former programme chief Benon Sevan and former UN sanctions branch head Joseph Stephanides may formally respond to corruption allegations.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
WHAT does a paint industry do when its closest neighbour is a huge industrial giant with massive manufacturing capabilities and large product innovation budgets? Unfortunately, when examining the Canadian paint sector, the answer is not one of David and Goliath but rather a more practical and unromantic approach.…

BY MARK ROWE
THE RUSSIAN oil and gas industry is one sector where comparison with the matryoshka doll – the dolls beloved by tourists that open up to reveal a series of ever smaller dolls within – seems particularly apt. Inside the outer doll, which represents the industry as a whole, you find a smaller doll representing Gazprom, the natural gas monolith.…

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 MONICA DOBIE
AN AMERICAN company from Michigan recently gave his employees a choice: quit smoking or lose your job. Four employees from Weyco, a firm that manages benefit plans for workers on behalf of other companies, were sacked in January after refusing to take a nicotine test on whether they had smoked since a deadline of January 1, this year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A UNITED Nations World Conference on Disaster Reduction, in Japan, has agreed a “Hyogo Framework for Action: 2005 – 2015,” which calls on governments to put disaster risk management at the centre of their national policies and for rich states to help improve disaster preparedness in poor countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GROUP of cotton exporting countries are resisting a move by the United States to dilute the mandate of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) cotton sub-committee, formed to find agreement on this sensitive issue during the WTO Doha Development Round.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A UNITED Nations meeting on small-island developing countries has concluded that they were already threatened with global-warming linked sea levels rises. Governments present also stressed the need to “intensify efforts to facilitate the full and effective participation” in World Trade Organisation decision-making.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ALTHOUGH the south Asian Tsunami meant 2004 was a terrible year for deaths caused by natural disasters, personal damage caused by such events was actually less than in 2003, the United Nations has reported. Its Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) said that more than 320,000 people perished last year in 366 natural disasters, with the Tsunami killing at least 300,000.…