LONDON, June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- An industrial dispute has arisen involving the INEOS Group of companies and Unite the union in relation to changes proposed to the company's pension arrangements for current and future employees at the Grangemouth Refinery Petrochemicals site in Scotland. In April 2008 industrial action took place and prior to the action commencing statements were made by both the company and the union representatives in relation to the dispute.

ABERDEEN, Scotland and 'S-HERTOGENBOSCH, The Netherlands, June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Quintiq, a leading provider of advanced planning and scheduling solutions, today announced that it has won the contract to provide a comprehensive resource optimisation solution to FirstGroup, the world's leading transport operator.

Following a successful pilot with First ScotRail, Quintiq's resource optimisation solutions will be implemented at all four of First's rail passenger franchises, First ScotRail, First TransPennine Express, First Capital Connect and First Great Western.

LONDON, June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of the industry day of action planned for 2nd July, the Road Haulage Association will be joining forces with other protest groups, primarily to support the Fuel Price Regulator amendment to the Finance Bill (expected to be debated at that time) and also the seek the introduction of an Essential User Rebate.

The lobby will commence at 11.30am in Old Palace Yard (opposite the House of Commons) until approx 1.00pm after which time members will be seeking meetings with their MPs to highlight the issues in person.

UTRECHT, the Netherlands, June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, monitored the most popular sports sites, belonging to each of the Euro 2008 nations. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites, to reveal that the nations with the best sports sites are France, Spain and the Netherlands. Sports enthusiasts in Turkey may be disappointed by confirmation that their nation's favorite sports site ranks as the worst, largely due to long load times.

With food prices going up, farmers are getting wealthy (or wealthier, in the case of the big conglomerates), right? Not outside the US, according to a study in Economic Development and Cultural Change by Marcel Fafchamps(1) and Ruth Vargas Hill(2).

In their new study for look to the long-time coffee producing nation of Uganda to attempt to answer the riddle of why higher prices don't 'trickle down' in other countries, even if they are modern liberalized economies.

Coffee is the world's largest agricultural commodity, and is also one of the world's most volatile. Large global coffee price fluctuations mean coffee has seen many periods of rapidly increasing prices. But new research shows that when global coffee prices rise, farmers do not see the same rise in the price they receive.

TOKYO, June 19 /PRNewswire/ --

The 8th United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland has unanimously approved a resolution tabled by Japan, entitled "Elimination of Discrimination Against Persons Affected by Leprosy and their Family Members." 58 countries, including China, have co-sponsored the resolution. The resolution is the result of repeated appeals on the issue by Nippon Foundation Chairman Yohei Sasakawa.

When six day care centers imposed a fine on parents who picked their children up late, tardiness doubled and it stayed high even when the fine was removed.

How can it be that a financial penalty made the problem worse? Parents, it seems, stopped seeing lateness as an imposition on teachers, and instead saw it as something that could be purchased with no moral failing.

A basic tenet of economics is that people always behave selfishly, or as the 18th century philosopher economist David Hume put it, "every man ought to be supposed to be a knave."

Information gleaned from a Greenland ice core by an international science team shows that two huge Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes prior to the close of the last ice age some 11,500 years ago were tied to fundamental shifts in atmospheric circulation.

The ice core showed the Northern Hemisphere briefly emerged from the last ice age some 14,700 years ago with a 22-degree-Fahrenheit spike in just 50 years, then plunged back into icy conditions before abruptly warming again about 11,700 years ago. Startlingly, the Greenland ice core evidence showed that a massive "reorganization" of atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere coincided with each temperature spurt, with each reorganization taking just one or two years, said the study authors.

The new findings are expected to help scientists improve existing computer models for predicting future climate change as increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere drive up Earth's temperatures globally.