TAG: Chemicals
Rishi Sunak’s Brexit trade agenda is faltering. Are the Gulf states his last hope?
LONDON — On the Red Sea coast at the northwest tip of Saudi Arabia, plans for an outlandish £400 billion ‘mega-city’ featuring an artificial moon and flying taxis are starting to take shape.While far from completion, the enigmatic project — known as NEOM...
6 months ago
EU takes the ax to green farming rules
The European Commission is finalizing a series of legislative proposals that would severely weaken environmental requirements for farmers — flying in the face of advice by its top scientists that agriculture must become more sustainable or it will be deci...
6 months ago
The MEPs who actually matter
This article is part of the Brussels Survival Guide.There’s plenty to pay attention to in the new cohort entering the European Parliament — including, of course, the people. See below our guide on key figures across the policy palette.Céline Imart AGRICUL...
2 months ago
Germany wants a Brexit mega deal
LONDON — Keir Starmer has said he wants a broad new security agreement with the EU. It could end up being very broad indeed.Berlin wants to turn the British prime minister’s proposed security pact into a veritable Brexit mega deal: encompassing everything...
2 months ago
Von der Leyen threads the climate needle to keep her job
BRUSSELS — Ursula von der Leyen has just pulled off a delicate green balancing act. The German politician secured a second term as European Commission president on Thursday with a political program carefully designed to woo both conservatives and environm...
2 months ago
The UK’s Brexit dream is dead
LONDON — British voters head to the polls Thursday for their first general election outside the European Union. But in so many ways, the Brexit dream has already died.All the key Vote Leave characters have left the stage. Five years after winning a landsl...
2 months ago
Right-wing MEPs loathe the Green Deal — but have no plan of attack
BRUSSELS — Lawmakers on the EU’s right flank can easily agree: They all hate the Green Deal.It’s how to channel that hatred that is proving hard. Even as green skeptics are set to arrive in the European Parliament in record numbers, there’s no discernible...
2 months ago
Forget Olympic athletes — will Parisians ever want to swim in the Seine?
PARIS — In the minds of French officials, the plan was ambitious but simple: Clean up the Seine for the 2024 Olympics and convince the world that everyone could enjoy a carefree dip in the notoriously murky river next summer.Well, Olympic athletes did ult...
2 months ago
Europe’s new normal: High energy bills, fading industry and one chance to fix it
ZIMMERN OB ROTTWEIL, Germany — You’ve never heard of Hans Keim Kunststoffe, but you’ve almost certainly come across one of its products.They’re protecting museum paintings, covering MRI machines during a hospital visit, forming a mobile caravan’s sunroof...
1 month ago
Germany’s rude economic awakening
BERLIN — Germany is finally emerging from the first stage of economic grief: denial.After years of turning a blind eye to what the rest of the world could plainly see, Germans are slowly coming to terms with the reality that they are in deep trouble as th...
3 weeks ago
Hydrogen’s toxic secret worries a town in northern France
This summer, residents of the northern French town of Villers-Saint-Paul received a disturbing warning: Don't eat your chickens' eggs.Tests had revealed that local eggs contained a cocktail of potentially dangerous PFAS, or "forever chemicals," a group of...
1 week ago
Germany’s economy goes from bad to worse
BERLIN — German Economy Minister Robert Habeck confirmed on Wednesday that the country's gross domestic product is set to shrink for the second year in a row, and blamed the economy’s deepening weakness on “failures of recent decades.”The German governmen...
6 days ago
Europe’s rivers are sick and governments are failing to fix them
Europe faces a water crisis of its own making, and EU countries aren't doing enough to avert it — that's the central message from a major new report on the state of Europe's water from the European Environmental Agency.The report, published Tuesday, paint...
19 hours ago
Global money laundering body to consider blacklisting Russia
BRUSSELS — The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the intergovernmental organization that leads the fight against money laundering and terrorism financing, will decide whether to put Russia on its blacklist next week, according to a confidential document...
14 hours ago