Search Results for: World Trade Organisation

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE MISSPELT word ‘lite’ is not sufficiently descriptive to be a European Union trademark for food products, the European Court of Justice has ruled. It rejected an appeal by German company Rewe Zentral AG against a refusal by the EU’s Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (Trade marks and Designs), to register ‘lite’ a ‘Community trademark.’…

BY MARK ROWE
THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund is to help set up an Islamic Financial Services Board to regulate and lay down standards for financial transactions throughout the Islamic world. A key aim of the project is to incorporate the special insurance tenets that exist in the Islamic business world into the wider capitalist system.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA, in Columbo
THE WORK of chartered accountants in India will next year be checked against the standards of their national professional organisation; the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has launched a “peer review” of its members, to help “firms in their quest for enhancement of the quality of work.”…

Keith Nuthall
FRANCE’S Loi Evin, which restricts the display of advertisements for alcoholic drinks, has come under attack from an unlikely source, a case at the European Court of Justice involving Newcastle United Football Club.

The team – locally known as the Magpies – is fighting legal action brought by Bacardi-Martini and Cellier des Dauphins.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
PLANS by American space agency NASA to develop nuclear energy sources that can be fitted onboard space ships have been discussed by the scientific and technical subcommittee of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs.

Its experts were informed of the earmarking of money in NASA’s 2003 budget for a new nuclear systems initiative.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INSURANCE companies are being unnecessarily exposed to risk through employment accident policies because of the estimated two million workers who die annually through job-related accidents or diseases, eighty per cent of which are preventable, the International Labour Organisation has claimed.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Health Organisation is advising countries experiencing a rise in resistance amongst malaria mosquitos to conventional medicines, such as chloroquine, to start promoting new combination treatment. These Artemisinin-Based Combination Therapies are derived in part from a Chinese herb, killing malaria parasites very fast, allowing patients to recover rapidly with few side effects.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
NATIONAL governments of the European Union should be prevented from imposing weekend or holiday driving bans on lorries carrying fresh flowers or horticultural products on international journeys, the European Parliament’s transport committee has said.

Voting to amend long debated proposals regulating the ability of Member States to restrict HGV movements on designated international main roads in the so-called Trans-European Network, (to reduce noise and nuisance), the EP’s transport committee has proposed limiting these powers regarding the garden trade sector.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE DECISION-MAKING of world food standards body Codex Alimentarius could be made simpler and more transparent, under a review by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation and World Health Organisation. They think, with the World Trade Organisation increasingly using Codex standards to adjudicate food trade disputes, governments and other parties should have more input into their establishment.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IN an increasingly borderless world, the power of international intellectual property conventions is growing ever stronger and the garden trade is being affected by this trend as much as mining and IT.…