France’s foreign ministry has launched a website in Mali, urging regular citizens to report suspected cases of corruption in any of development projects that the French presently funds.
The site, L’aide française au Mali (French Aid To Mali), lists every development program that the French government presently sponsors in Mali and provides an online form, as well as a number to text, if Malians wish to report any irregularities in the programs.
Syria will take about a year to assemble and destroy its arsenal of chemical weapons, said its President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, though he insisted that his government’s cooperation had not been borne out of America’s military threat.
During an interview with U.S. broadcaster Fox News, Assad said that his government intends to “fully cooperate” with the U.S.-Russian plan to decommission the regime’s chemical weapons, but denied any responsibility for the gas attack that killed more than 1,000 people in the city of Ghouta last month.
In May this year, the U.S. Internal Service (IRS) was accused of misusing its audit powers after the agency revealed that it had targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for closer scrutiny based on their names or political themes.
The controversy subsequently led to both political and public condemnation of the agency, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating the IRS’s actions as part of a criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder.
The European Union is set to hold talks with China either late this year or early 2014 on improving market access for its members in the world’s second largest economy, said EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht on Tuesday, describing the current relationship between the two markets as “a fundamental source of mutual benefit”, which could still do with further strengthening.
The Russian military has sent 10 warships to a previously abandoned naval base off its Arctic Coast, in an apparent bid to protect the new northern shipping route to Asia, as well as to secure the region’s vast energy resources, according to a Reuters report on Monday.
Somalia can expect to receive nearly 1.8 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in aid from international donors over the next three years, reported Reuters on Monday, after an EU-led donation drive pledged to back the African nation’s reconstruction efforts following decades of civil war.
Rates of unemployment for lowest-income families in the U.S. – those earning less than $20,000 a year – have topped 21 percent in 2013, according to a report by the Associated Press on Monday, matching the level of unemployment suffered during the 1930s Great Depression and creating a wide employment gap between the rich and the poor.
The European Union’s plan to cut nearly 40 percent of its food aid programs to Portugal could lead to hundreds of thousands of poor people facing severe food shortages, according to a report by Reuters, with nearly 22 percent of the Portuguese already suffering from material deprivation, including almost 9 percent from severe deprivation.
More than 250 companies and individuals were placed on the World Bank’s blacklist of corrupt or fraudulent entities during the first seven months of 2013, said the international organisation on Sunday, with the total amounting for nearly four times the number for the whole of 2012 and the highest number of reported cases over the last seven years.
The governments of Argentina and Brazil have agreed to cooperate on improving their cyber defence capabilities, following revelations that the U.S. was spying on South American governments through their e-mails, phone calls and other forms of communications.
“We need to reflect on how we cooperate to face these new forms of attack,” said Brazil’s Defence Minister, Celso Amorim, during a joint conference with his Argentine counterpart Agustin Rossi in Buenos Aires.
