Search Results for: united nations⊂mit=Search

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE SOUTH Asian tsunami did not just destroy homes and businesses – it wrecked schools, social clubs, and sports facilities. Now a donation of 50,000 footballs has been made to encourage sporting fervour in Aceh, Indonesia, the region worst hit by the disaster.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) has launched a European Union (EU)-funded Euro 725,000 research aimed at improving health standards within the food industries of Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The studies aim to suggest ways of promoting a “new decision-making culture on food quality and safety among managers and policy makers”.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) is catching up with the United States in innovation, a European Commission-financed statistical report has claimed, although the US still has many significant advantages. This year’s European Innovation Scoreboard (2006) concludes: “The innovation gap between the EU [minus new members Bulgaria and Romania] and Japan, and in particular with the US is decreasing.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A TRIAL over two years of a new global voluntary compact to reduce mercury poisoning is now being staged by the United Nations, which says it will press for an international and binding treaty on the problem if the guidelines do not work.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) is pushing signatories to its new Protocol on Water and Health to its Convention on Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes to agree detailed targets on improving European water quality.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) anti-fraud agency OLAF has helped uncover three rules-of-origin frauds costing EU coffers millions of Euros. In one case, an OLAF-German police inquiry has uncovered the loss of Euro 50 million in duties by the illicit rerouting of Chinese energy-saving lamps via Vietnam, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka and Tunisia to evade 66.1% anti-dumping duties on China-made lamps; Euro 7 million of avoided taxation has been recovered.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) is heading for a clash with the United States over its use of passenger name record data, with the EU justice Commissioner Franco Frattini pledging to get tough in negotiations over replacing the current deal by July.…

BY MARK ROWE
CLIMATE change is now widely accepted as taking place across the planet, with huge implications for all industries, and the energy sector is no exception. Predictions from expert weather organisations make unsettling reading: the long-range forecast is for extremes of temperatures and more violent weather, more often.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
AN odd fact about Serbia today is that hardly anybody in the country seems curious about the way its official government financial figures don’t remotely add up. The authors of a US-sponsored report for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) published last October – ‘Money Laundering and Predicate Crime in Serbia 2000-2005’ – acknowledge the conventional shortages of staff and computers but say they “hit on a more fundamental void: lack of curiosity.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITISH and German scientists have made a breakthrough in developing Europe’s most common food and animal based pathogen – salmonella – which is increasingly resistant to standard antibiotics.

Britain’s Institute of Food Research and the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, of Germany, have discovered how salmonella bacteria defends itself in hostile environments (such as stomachs and intestines) by continually inserting outer membrane proteins (OMPs) into its cell walls.…