Search Results for: America

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE LATEST BSE discovery in Canada has inspired the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF)/United Stockgrowers of America organisation to sue the US Agriculture Department to prevent imports of Canadian cattle and beef products.

R-CALF says Canadian imports pose health risks to people and cows, costing American producers up to US$3 billion in lost demand.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

COSMETICS, perfume and personal hygiene companies in the Mercosur region of South America will have to stage annual health inspections of their manufacturing systems under a resolution agreed by member states Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. These will have to demonstrate that companies are following prescribed Mercosur standards of good practice, with written reports being produced by in-house laboratories, detailing results and any reforms that are required.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

ONLY comparatively recently have the world’s anti money laundering agencies come to grips with alternative remittance systems (ARS) and even today the scale of the systems and the degree of infiltration by criminals is still not fully known.…

BY MONICA DOBIE

A NEW genetic test that can detect devastating clam disease QPX has been developed by American scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in Cape Cod Massachusetts. They claim the test is sensitive enough to detect the QPX organism not only in clams, but also in seawater and sediment.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
WAL-MART Canada Corp is consulting its lawyers after the retail chain was told to accept union recognition at a Quebec store, only the second time this has happened in the whole of north America. The Quebec Labour Relations Commission has certified workers at the Saint-Hyacinthe store, 60 km east of Montreal, as belonging to and represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada (UFCW).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE MULTILATERAL Investment Guarantee Agency, or MIGA, is the international organisation companies turn to when they want to invest in a jurisdiction where their assets might not be that safe. Mining companies have long used MIGA to cover risks that are too tasty for the private insurance industry, and the agency has issued 58 guarantees for the sector since it was formed in 1988.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan facing unprecedented pressure for his resignation over the involvement of his son in the brewing Iraq oil for food scandal, the spotlight has again fallen on the finances of his global body.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has approved new drug precursor controls that take account of the EU’s becoming a centre for the manufacture of illicit synthetic drugs such as Ecstasy. These reforms amend existing rules that mainly prevented the export of chemicals used to make cocaine and heroin to manufacturing centres for these drugs in Asia and Latin America.…

Keith Nuthall
INTERNATIONAL tourist travel has rebounded strongly this year from its September 11-attacks induced torpor, the World Tourism Organisation has claimed. Between January and August 2004, the number of international tourist arrivals grew 12% compared to the same months in 2003, said the UN agency.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WANT to sell cigarettes? Go east, young man. That might be the advice that tobacco companies could glean from the latest set of World Health Organisation (WHO) smoking figures. Using 2003 or latest available data, the WHO has collated percentage rate proportions of smoking adults (18 and over), compared with total populations of all but 56 countries: the overwhelming majority of nations.…