Search Results for: Mexico

BY KEITH NUTHALL
NOBODY likes to be on a blacklist, especially one written by the American government. But every year, the US state department issues a comprehensive rogues gallery of countries involved in the narcotics trade and related criminal problems. One surprising entrant: the United States.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITAIN has been given a relatively clean bill of health in the latest Transparency International corruption rankings, being viewed as joint-11th least-corrupt country in the world, sharing its billing with Canada and Luxembourg. Finland was the most honest place in which to do business said the pressure group’s survey, followed by Iceland and the Denmark plus New Zealand at joint third.…

BY MARK WILSON
AWASH with recently-passed legislation and newly-established Financial Investigation Units, the small nations of the Caribbean have transformed their money laundering controls since the mid-1990s. In 2000, five Caribbean island jurisdictions made up one-third of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) list of fifteen non-cooperative countries and territories, each of them with ‘serious systemic problems,’ in the words of a FATF review published on June 22 of that year.…

BY PHILIP FINE

NATIVE Americans, cattle ranchers and environmentalists are trying to limit oil and natural gas drilling in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, taking the US government to a Washington DC federal district court. BP, El Paso and Burlington hope to increase production after federal officials recently said they would permit nearly the sinking of 10,000 new wells over the next two decades.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States government will have to reconsider the fate of foreign nationals on death row, after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled it had breached its obligations under the Vienna Convention on consular relations, by failing to inform 51 Mexican convicts of their right to contact diplomats “without delay” after arrest.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL conference on the faltering World Trade Organisation (WTO) agricultural liberalisation negotiations has been told that full agreement is now unlikely to be achieved until 2007. If this comes to pass, it would drive a coach and horses through the existing January 2005 deadline for concluding the Doha Development Round, of which the agricultural talks form a key part.…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE NEW York Times is reporting that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been pressuring its scientific experts to approve meat products not yet deemed safe. An unnamed senior USDA scientist said department researchers had been pressured to approve cattle from Mexico at risk of tuberculosis and, in August, following their BSE scare, boneless meat from Canadian cattle, prior to the conclusion of an in-house study.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GROUP of countries have formed a network of excellence developing expertise in the deep underground storage of radioactive waste. Coordinated by the International Atomic Energy Agency, participants include Belgium’s Hades Underground Research Facility in Mol; Canada’s Underground Research Laboratory of Lac-du-Bonnet, Manitoba; Switzerland’s Grimsel Test Site and Mont-Terri Underground Research Laboratory; Britain’s Geo-Environmental Research Centre, Cardiff; and the USA’s WIPP facility, New Mexico, the Yucca Mountain Project, Nevada, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, San Francisco.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A COALITION of major business groups has filed an amicus brief at the United States Supreme Court, calling on it to “clarify” the USA’s 1789 Alien Tort Statute, which they claim is being abused by special interest groups.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AMERICAN police have arrested 10 people in what authorities describe as the country’s largest ever cigarette smuggling ring, seizing more than US$18.1 million worth of black market bound tobacco. Some of the estimated 100 million smuggled cigarettes were counterfeits from Asia hidden in imported plastic goods or toys.…