Search Results for: United Nations

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE KUWAIT, Yemen and United States governments have signed two trade and investment deals promoting oil commerce, notably Kuwaiti and Yemeni crude and petroleum product exports to the US and American oil extraction and transport equipment to Yemen and Kuwait.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IT will be several years before Canada’s trading partners admit Canadian live cattle, according to a report from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The document – written after BSE was detected Alberta, but before its discovery in the United States – suggests that effective diplomacy will be needed to convince countries, rather than more scientific measures.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
A NEW volcanic gas and ash detector created by Australian scientists could enable the airport and airline industries to save both money and lives. The ‘Ground-based Infra-Red Detection’ (G-bIRD) system is being developed by Australia’s CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) and the country’s Tenix Defence Electronic Systems division.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL conference on the faltering World Trade Organisation (WTO) agricultural liberalisation negotiations has been told that full agreement is now unlikely to be achieved until 2007. If this comes to pass, it would drive a coach and horses through the existing January 2005 deadline for concluding the Doha Development Round, of which the agricultural talks form a key part.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A COMBINED investment of around Euro 50 million in United Utilities Europe (UUE) by the United Utilities group and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will allow the subsidiary to increase its ownership of three eastern European water and wastewater companies.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IRAN’S foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi has blamed the tough restrictions imposed on its acquisition of nuclear technology via the global Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for his government’s use of secrecy in its civil nuclear programme. “Had it not been for the severity of the impediments, Iran would have pursued all its entirely legal nuclear activities with fuller transparency and in collaboration with other fellow members as it had always sought,” he told a United Nations disarmament conference, in Geneva.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) law enforcement agencies are intensifying their fight against the counterfeiting of the Euro currency, as European Central Bank (ECB) figures show an increase in seizures of forged banknotes. In the second half of 2003, 311,925 counterfeit notes were discovered in Euro and non-Euro countries, a 30 per cent increase over the first six months of 2003, when counterfeit seizures had been 59 per cent more numerous than in the previous half-year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE PETROL additives tetraethyl lead and tetramethyl lead have been provisionally added to a United Nations (UN) Rotterdam Convention Prior Informed Consent (PIC) blacklist, which allows countries to block imports of listed products on environmental health grounds. Final confirmation would be made at a convention meeting this September, in Geneva.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WORLD tobacco and cigarette production is set to increase significantly this decade according to United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) projections, which estimates the number of smokers will grow from 1.1 billion in 1998 to around 1.3 billion in 2010.…

BY PHILIP FINE

A UNITED States Department of Energy scientist has developed a process (using a metal catalyst, nitrogen, methanol, and water) that could extend the life of the catalysts that make fuel cells work. Chemist Devinder Mahajan’s low-temperature system avoids the usual degrading to expensive catalysts that convert hydrogen into electricity, turning almost 100 per cent of the carbon monoxide in the hydrogen feed into carbon dioxide and additional hydrogen, he claimed.…