Airbus performance lead EADS to raises its profit growth target

Strong performance of Airbus, one of the main subsidiaries of EADS, Europe’s biggest aerospace and defence group, has encouraged its full-year profit growth target to 18 per cent.

EADS interim earnings before interest and tax jumped 57 percent of EURO 1.54 billion. In addition, the company’s margin increased from 6.7 per cent last year to 9.6 per cent in the six months to June 30.

Net profit more than doubled to EURO 816 million. Airbus’s ebit contribution was 47 per cent higher at EURO 1.4 billion. Airbus delivered 189 aircraft to customers in the half, 28 more than during the same period last year. It expects to deliver 360 aircraft this year.

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Six-party talk resumes in Beijing over North Korea nuke

The six-party talk on North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, resumed in Beijing. North Korea and U.S. are putting fresh demands at the table. It was also attended by South Korea, Japan, China and Russia.

Parties are meeting for the third day to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in return for food and economic aid, and security guarantees.

U.S. negotiators will draft principles today that may lead to an accord with North Korea over the destruction of the communist state’s nuclear weapons.

U.S. and North Korean delegates will hold a bilateral meeting today, a senior U.S. official said last night. The representatives of the six nations are scheduled to meet this morning to discuss what was said yesterday in a full plenary session when each side read out a statement.

They will also be invited to a luncheon hosted by China’s National People’s Congress Chairman Wu Bangguo, according to a South Korean official who declined to be identified.

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A six-nation post-Kyoto pact to fight Global Warming

The United States and five Asian and Pacific nations, Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea have agreed to work together for a better tomorrow in a wake to build new energy technology as a way to reduce dangerous emissions that pollute the air and warm the atmosphere.

Negotiations on the partnership deal have been in the works for five or six months. White House officials see the partnership as an important step in setting up a system to help emerging industrial countries produce cleaner energy and slow the growth of climate-changing emissions, especially carbon from fossil fuels.

Unlike the Kyoto Protocol that mandate country targets for curbing emissions, it promotes the use of alternative, cleaner energy sources. The countries involved accounted for about 50 per cent of global emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere and are blamed for global warming, seen as one of the world’s greatest environmental dangers.

One of its goals is to battle pollution in a way that does not seriously hamper economic growth, one of the objections Mr Bush raised about the Kyoto Protocol when he announced he would not submit the treaty to the US Senate for ratification.

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Researchers say, the rate of American children being sickened by pesticides at school jumped 39% in four years, from 5.6 out of every million students in 1998 to 7.8 per million in 2002.

The number of children poisoned by pesticides at school has jumped in recent years, according to a new study that measured the casualties of organized spraying in and around classrooms.

Dr. Walter Alarcon of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said that doesn’t count the untold number of children who may not know they were exposed to pesticides at school nor don’t suspect pesticides cause their sickness.

“Pesticide exposures at schools continue to produce acute illnesses among school employees and students in the United States, albeit mainly of low severity,” said Alarcon, whose findings appear in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

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