Search Results for: Indonesia

BY MATTHEW BRACE
THERE are not many countries left on the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) blacklist of dodgy jurisdictions regarding money laundering regulations, and one of the last stragglers – the South Pacific nation of the Cook Islands (a New Zealand dependency) – was provisionally removed in February.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SUDDENLY accountants are being held in unusually high esteem and it’s all because of their work in connection with the relief effort for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami. To date some Pounds 4.7 billion for the stricken countries has been raised worldwide but nothing like that sum has yet got through to the people affected; some of it stolen perhaps and some of it wasted, but a lot of it bogged down in inadequate financial infrastructures: step forward the big multinational accountancy firms who have provided staff, management and professional advice and training, a good deal of it on a pro bono publico basis.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE TERMS of reference for a Commission of Truth and Friendship have been agreed by Indonesia and Timor-Leste (East Timor). The tribunal aims to apportion responsibility for the violence during and after the East Timor independence referendum of 1999.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
SINGAPORE’S economy is rejuvenating after the horrors of early 2004 when the threat of terrorism (both internationally and closer to home in South East Asia), and then the SARS virus hit the city state hard, shrinking demand for construction and hence the amount of money to be made by the coatings sector.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
PRESIDENT George W Bush’s re-election last November has pretty well ruled out any change in the US ban on Cuban cigars for the next four years – if anything, things are likely to get tougher. One of the last things the previous Bush administration did last October was to actually tighten the import ban by barring Americans travelling to Cuba from bringing back up to US$100 dollars worth of Cuban cigars.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE 2005 Yearbook of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned environmental change is spreading diseases beyond their traditional range, while causing pathogens to mutate and become more deadly.

It includes a number of case studies, illustrating one message: “Loss of forests, road and dam building, the spread of cities, the clearing of natural habitats for agriculture, mining and the pollution of coastal waters are promoting conditions under which new and old pathogens can thrive”.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has announced plans to bring forward by three months – to April 1 – its planned introduction of tariff preferences for developing countries for those states affected by the Tsunami disaster. European Union (EU) tariffs cuts will follow for a wide range of food products exported by India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A BAN on imports into the European Union (EU) on poultry meat or poultry from Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, China, Vietnam, Pakistan and Malaysia has been extended until this September, because of concerns that bird flu is still present in these countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks sparked a tightening of security restrictions around the world and the shipping industry has been a key focus. The latest initiative is the creation of a global system of biometric identifiers for seafarers. Keith Nuthall reports.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
THE WORLD is waking up to biofuels, increasingly produced from food crops and their waste by-products, and now one of the growing energy alternatives to conventional fossil fuels. As prices for traditional energy rise year on year, and energy watchers warn of oil production peaking around 2010, governments are looking towards food producers to grow the raw feedstock for the fuel of the twenty-first century.…