The European Union’s top antitrust regulator has charged that Intel tried to use its huge market share to push smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) out of the central processing unit business. The two companies make all the chips at the processing heart of the world’s personal computers and servers, but Intel has about 80% of the business.
Bulgaria said it was hopeful of an agreement with Libyan authorities on Monday that would pave the way for the release of six foreign medics convicted of infecting Libyan children with HIV. Prospects for the release of the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor appeared to rise after France’s first lady and a top European Commission official flew to Libya.
The European Union (EU) is set to take a tentative step on Monday towards sending forces to Chad to help the United Nations protect refugees from Sudan’s Darfur region. UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno had urged the 27-nation bloc on Tuesday to send troops and helicopters.
The European Union’s Court of Justice on Wednesday annulled a European Union (EU) antitrust decision that had prevented South African giant De Beers from buying rough diamonds from Russian rival Alrosa. The EU court said that European Commission efforts to curb business between the two diamond operations was ”manifestly disproportionate”.
Belgian rider Geert Steegmans won the second stage of the Tour de France, a 168,5km run between Dunkirk in France and Ghent in Belgium, on Monday. The Quick Step cyclist prevailed in a bunch sprint marred by a mass pile-up that stopped a sizeable portion of the peloton in its tracks 3km from the finish.
A Belgian court sentenced a former Rwandan army major to 20 years in prison on Thursday for the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeepers and an undetermined number of Rwandan civilians at the start of the 1994 genocide. The public prosecutor had asked for a life sentence for the accused’s role in the genocide.
Europe’s major consumer group BEUC said on Wednesday that it fears internet search giant Google’s takeover of online ad tracker DoubleClick would damage European Union privacy rights and limit consumers’ choice of web content. The association has asked European authorities to look into privacy concerns.
Charles Taylor will get hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal aid to defend charges of war crimes in Sierra Leone, despite suspicions he is hiding huge personal wealth. The former Liberian president faces 11 charges at the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, including instigating murder, rape and terrorism.
European Union officials have signalled that they will ban subsidies for biofuels in cases where their production causes serious environmental damage. Staff at the union’s executive arm, the European Commission, have now recognised that the production of biofuels can be ecologically destructive.
The European Union is failing to prioritise health and education in its plans for spending aid in poor countries, according to a new study, which also found that the EU appears to be using development aid to promote Western political and commercial interests, rather than to alleviate hardship.
Prime Minister Tony Blair ended his swansong appearance on the international stage on a high note on Saturday, helping clinch a deal for a new European Union treaty and trumpeting that Europe was turning Britain’s way. And tributes flowed from his fellow EU leaders after a marathon summit in Brussels, which he said allowed the reforming bloc to ”move on” after two years of institutional inertia.
European Union leaders clinched agreement on Saturday on a mandate to overhaul the 27-nation bloc after persuading Poland to end a stand-off that nearly torpedoed a marathon summit. The leaders agreed to negotiate a reform treaty by the end of this year, to be ratified by mid-2009.
European Union leaders reached broad agreement on Friday on a single post to run EU foreign affairs, the first success at a summit on the bloc’s future, but Poland help up progress towards a treaty to reform the union. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, hosting the summit, struggled to break Poland’s resistance.
Families of foreign medics sentenced to death for infecting Libyan children with the virus that causes Aids urged European Union leaders in Brussels on Thursday to help clinch a deal. Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were convicted in December of deliberately infecting 426 children.
Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said on Wednesday time may be running out to organise free and fair elections next March. The Zimbabwe government and Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change re holding talks in South Africa seeking to solve the political crisis that reached new heights earlier this year.
World leaders must follow a move by the United States to impose fresh sanctions against Sudan for its refusal to allow a major United Nations-led peacekeeping force into war-torn Darfur, South African Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu said on Tuesday.
Nato allies are studying a request from the African Union to provide air transport for its troops in Somalia, an alliance official said on Wednesday. ”We are seeking military advice on how to respond to the request. There is an intention among allies to help,” said the official of an AU request he said Nato received in recent days.
Ghana Foreign Minister Nana Akufo-Addo, whose country heads the African Union, insisted on Tuesday that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe should be invited to a European Union-Africa summit in December. ”We can’t have a situation where people pick and choose which Africans they deal with when they deal with Africa on a continental basis,” he said.
The European Union and South Africa on Monday signed a new agreement aimed at strengthening political ties and vowed to step up cooperation in migration and climate change. Discussions also focused on the future status of Serbia’s breakaway region of Kosovo.
The European Commission said on Thursday that the European Union’s Galileo satellite navigation system would need to be entirely financed with public money to get the troubled programme back on track. The private consortium building the project was supposed to give plans on Thursday to overcome the current impasse.
The European Commission has dropped its attempt to ban imperial weights and measures in the face of British opposition, a European Union spokesperson said on Tuesday. The news was hailed in the United Kingdom by Neil Herron, campaign director of the Metric Martyrs Group.
The European Commission has laid the legal groundwork to force Ryanair to sell some or all of its one-quarter holding in Aer Lingus if the European Union turns down its takeover bid. People familiar with the statement of objections say it concludes that Ryanair would lock up the Irish air market if it acquired the partly state-owned peer.
A year after its launch, 2,5-million Europeans and companies have registered a .eu domain name, making it the seventh-most-widespread website address suffix in the world and the third in the European Union. Air France KLM and Italian design house Versace are among the firms that have registered and have functioning websites.
Top climate experts warned on Friday that global warming will cause faster and wider damage than previously forecast. More than 100 nations in the United Nations climate panel agreed a final text after all-night disputes with some scientists accusing government delegates of watering down their findings.
Climate experts neared agreement on Friday on the strongest United Nations warning yet about the impacts of global warming. But scientists working with government delegates from more than 100 nations on the UN climate panel were still stuck in talks after an all-night session in Brussels.
The European Commission confirmed on Tuesday that it has launched an anti-trust probe into online music sales by computer company Apple and several major record labels. In order to buy a music download from the iTunes’ Belgian online store a consumer must use a credit card issued by a bank with an address in Belgium.
European Union regulators halted an antitrust investigation into Sony and Bertelsmann AG’s 2004 deal to merge their music units after the companies failed to hand in required data, the European Commission said on Friday. ”This means that the clock has stopped on this case until such time as the information is received,” the commission said in a statement.
The African Union on Wednesday denounced European Union ”double standards” in taking action against Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe while ignoring abuses by other African leaders. ”I would have preferred that there were no double standards at the European level, even for judging heads of state,” the AU representative in Brussels told reporters.
A container ship is docked at Ghana’s Tema port, stuffed to the brim with frozen food products, including thousands of metric tonnes of poultry parts recently arrived from Brazil. These are unloaded into cold storage facilities until they can be transported to the capital, Accra, or elsewhere in the country. And then the electricity goes out.
The European Union has reached a deal on ”ambitious and credible” targets to tackle climate change and energy needs, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday after a summit of EU leaders. The agreement, addressing such issues as biofuels and renewable energy, commits Europe to take the lead in fighting global warming.
The head of the Tintin studio announced on Thursday that Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks company has committed to produce at least one movie on the famed Belgian cartoon character. Hergé Studios head Nick Rodwell said the Hollywood company will go into pre-production of a Tintin movie.
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/ 28 February 2007
Does the presence of Heineken beer in Sierra Leone contribute to reduction of child mortality? How does chemicals company Akzo Nobel help prevent environmental damage? The Dutch have set up an "MDG Scan" to keep score on what multinational companies do towards realisation of the United Nations’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).