Search Results for: United Nations

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INDEPENDENT Inquiry Committee into the United Nations’ Iraq Oil for Food programme scandal has claimed 14 British companies paid kickbacks to the Saddam Hussein regime to secure contracts to supply humanitarian supplies under the scheme. There were also four British companies that paid “surcharges” to secure contracts to lift oil from Iraq to help buy medicines, food and other supposed essentials.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE ROLE of the Caribbean as a staging point for ill-gotten gains goes back to the trans-Atlantic misadventures of the first European ships over 400 years ago. It would appear some habits die hard. Wesley Gibbings reports from Port of Spain, Trinidad.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
UNESCO, the UN’s scientific and cultural organisation, has launched a filter removing arsenic from water and which could save tens of millions of lives. Unveiled at its headquarters in Paris, UNESCO said the filter was “simple and ecologically sound”, using as an absorbent recycled iron oxide coated sand produced as a by-product in groundwater treatment plants “available at no cost almost everywhere”.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
UNESCO, the UN’s scientific and cultural organisation, has launched a filter removing arsenic from water and which could, it claims, save tens of millions of lives from a pollutant created by many mines. Unveiled at its headquarters in Paris, UNESCO said the filter was “simple and ecologically sound”, using as an absorbent recycled iron oxide coated sand produced as a by-product in groundwater treatment plants “available at no cost almost everywhere”.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
STANDFIRST

AMERICA’S post 9/11 AML legislation does not only affect the formal banking sector, it controls other savings and investment institutions too, and in different ways. Alan Osborn reports.

MUTUAL FUNDS

ALTHOUGH there have been some complaints, by and large America’s mutual funds have accepted with reasonable grace the anti money laundering legislation brought in by the US government since the September 11 attacks.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States has requested formal talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) with China, which it accuses of depressing American markets with imports of certain circular welded non-alloy steel pipe. This, Washington claims in a memorandum to the WTO, has caused “market disruption to US domestic producers”.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
FOOD scientists have discovered that innocuous and bland-tasting watermelon actually contains high levels of lycopene, a cancer-fighting anti-oxidant found in tomatoes but not much else. The US Agricultural Research Service (ARS) says watermelon could prove an effective alternative to people with tomato allergies or bouts of acid reflux, given it offers similar quantities of lycopene to tomatoes.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INDEPENDENT Inquiry Committee into the United Nations’ Iraq Oil for Food programme scandal has claimed 14 British companies paid kickbacks to the Saddam Hussein regime to secure contracts to supply humanitarian supplies. There were also four British companies that paid “surcharges” to secure contracts to lift oil from Iraq to help buy medicines, food and other essentials.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is planning to rewrite European Union (EU) laws affecting the fishing meat industry to simplify existing EU legislation across the board, easing the sector’s understanding of often complex and baffling regulations.

Brussels has embarked on a three-year programme to scrap obsolete laws, rewrite over-complicated texts and combine overlapping directives and regulations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CRITICS of European political institutions have sometimes been unkind about the Council of Europe, which has been accused of being a powerless talking shop. And although the Council lacks the power to fine and cajole member governments enjoyed by the European Union (EU) – from which it is completely independent – it has some important roles.…