According to the Public Accounts Committee, tougher rules are needed to prevent the abuse of some 24,000 government credit cards by UK civil servants. In a report published today, the Committee said 99 questionable cases were uncovered over the past three years, including spending by Ministry of Defence military and civilian staff in bars, restaurants and golf clubs.
In 2010, global donor aid for low-income countries reached $26.9 billion, leading to major successes in public health and saving millions of lives. Yet, there are still some who would have you believe that all the funds are going to waste, and that aid-supported programs should be halted immediately.
NEW YORK – The critics of foreign aid are wrong. A growing flood of data shows that death rates in many poor countries are falling sharply, and that aid-supported programs for health-care delivery have played a key role. Aid works; it saves lives.
Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Monti has called for a two to three-year hiatus for the entire football league in the country following a spate of match-fixing incidents, which have resulted in over 50 men arrested in the last year.
Over the last few years, the Italian football league, known as Serie A, have been rocked by a match fixing scandal that has seen players, coaches and even officials questioned by the police.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in the U.S. recently released an infographic, which detailed how Americans utilised energy, as well as the various sources of energy in the country.
One of the most notable findings from the study showed that fossil fuel was still a key energy resource, though the U.S. economy remained highly diversified in its energy needs.
In a radical policy shift, the European Commission has called for the creation of a “banking union” that can centrally oversee and if necessary bailout the banking sector. As concerns over Spain’s financial health continue to grow, the policy shift would allow the banking union to share the burden of bank failures, without having to go through national governments.
Hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans will see their unemployment benefits end sooner than expected despite Congress signing into effect an unemployment benefits extension through the end of the year.
June onwards, several states across the United States will reduce the number of extended unemployment benefit checks, as mandated by federal law, as unemployment rates are no longer on the rise.
Nearly a quarter of all European companies operating in China are considering a switch of their investments away from the country, claimed a survey by the European Union Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday, as higher labour costs and an increasingly difficult regulatory environment continue to weigh heavily on companies’ profit margins.
According to existing data from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, foreign direct investment from the EU has already slumped in the first four months of 2012 – by 27.9 percent compared to the same period last year.
European and Asian markets rose today on fresh speculation that China is set to ramp up stimulus spending in order to avoid a sharp economic contraction. According to a report by Credit Suisse released Monday, the central bank injection could be as high as 2 trillion yuan ($315 billion).
The speculation came as China’s official Shanghai Securities News reported the country’s biggest banks appeared to have accelerated lending towards the end of this month as Beijing started to fast track its approval of infrastructure investments.
The cooperative movements, which began in the 1800s, have sometimes struggled to live up to their ideals. Some fall victim to bad politics, weak governance, or mismanagement, while others are exposed to risks stemming from over-concentration. But as we search for innovative solutions to today’s development challenges, we should consider what the cooperative movement can offer and figure out how to facilitate the spread of cooperatives’ best practices while avoiding their common pitfalls.
China’s Ministry of Finance will impose a duty on all oil shipments entering Chinese waters beginning from July this year, said the China Daily on Tuesday, with the proceeds set to go into a new marine pollution compensation fund to be utilised during an oil spill.
