Suchergebnisse

India and the US in late January reached what Pres Barack Obama described as a 'breakthrough understanding' on two issues that have held up nuclear trade between the two countries under a deal reached under Pres George W. Bush. The understandings, announced January 25 during Obama's visit to India to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, deal with the issues of liability in case of an accident at a foreign-supplied reactor in India and with the tracking of US material exported to India. The second issue concerns the so-called administrative arrangements that are a standard part of US nuclear cooperation with other countries. Like other nuclear exporters, the US maintains those arrangements to ensure that the material it sends to other countries for their peaceful nuclear programs does not end up in weapons programs. The two sides released little specific information on what they had agreed, but interviews with sources from industry, Congress, and elsewhere who had been briefed by administration officials provided a generally consistent picture of the US-Indian understandings. Adapted from the source document.

The Anti-Kickback Act is one of the instruments the Government uses to punish and prevent procurement fraud. The Act creates criminal and civil liability for the use of kickbacks by government contractors. Specifically, the civil provision contains two subsections -- one punishing employees for their actions, and the other punishing employers under a theory of strict liability. In United States ex rel. Vavra v. Kellogg, Brown & Root, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that employers are subject to vicarious liability for their employees' violations of the first subsection of the civil suit provision of the Anti-Kickback Act in addition to being strictly liable under the second subsection, effectively punishing employers twice for their employees' actions. Moreover, the Fifth Circuit suggested that vicarious liability could exist when, in the absence of employers' knowledge, employees act with apparent authority to defraud the Government by offering or accepting kickbacks. This Note examines and critiques the Fifth Circuit's decision and proposes an elevated standard before imposing vicarious liability on employers for their employees' violations of the Anti-Kickback Act. At the very least, the Government should be required to show that where an employer had no knowledge of its employee's actions, the employee, acting with apparent authority, intended for his or her actions to benefit the employer.

In an interview, Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue, talked about the the possibility of a visit by US Pres Barack Obama to Nagasaki and the concept of a Northeast Asian nuclear-weapon-free zone. When Taue met with the US government officials last month, he made a request for the president to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The reason for this is that if the US president visits these atomic bomb cities, the other leaders will likely follow. The steps that Japan could take to accelerate progress toward nuclear disarmament and reduce its own reliance and other states' reliance on nuclear deterrence are to establish a security policy that does not rely on nuclear deterrence, promote trust building in the region, and establish a Northeast Asian nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region. This idea of a comprehensive security arrangement in Northeast Asia is something that the Japanese government could implement. Adapted from the source document.

The last of Syria's declared chemical weapons materials have left that country, Ahmet Uzumcu, director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), announced June 23. Officials from the countries and organizations involved in the operation hailed the 'major landmark', as Uzumcu called it, in the effort to remove the chemical weapons materials from Syria and destroy them outside the country. But the officials also pointed to a list of remaining questions about Syria's chemical weapons program. In late September, the OPCW Executive Council and the UN Security Council approved a plan based on the US-Russian agreement, calling for destruction of the Syrian stockpile in the first half of 2014. A subsequent Executive Council decision set intermediate deadlines of December 31 for removal of the highest-priority chemicals and February 5 for the remaining chemicals that were to be destroyed outside the country. Adapted from the source document.

The destruction of the most dangerous of Syria's chemical weapons materials was completed August 18 aboard a US ship in the Mediterranean Sea, US Pres Barack Obama announced in a statement that day. The MV Cape Ray neutralized about 600 metric tons of Syrian chemicals using two mobile units of the Field Deployable Hydrolysis System, a technology developed by the Defense Department. About 20 metric tons was weapons-usable sulfur mustard, and the rest was a sarin precursor known as DF, according to figures from the Defense Department and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The announcement of the milestone in the ongoing effort to destroy Syria's chemical weapons program came a few days before the one-year anniversary of a chemical attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, the catalyst for the sequence of events that led to Syrian chemical weapons materials being destroyed on a US ship. Adapted from the source document.

The US will destroy Syria's most dangerous chemical weapons, using a mobile technology on board a ship, officials from the international team that is overseeing Syrian chemical disarmament said late last month. In a November 30 press release, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the operations would be conducted 'on a US vessel at sea using hydrolysis, a process that breaks down the chemical agent with hot water and a caustic compound such as sodium hydroxide. Hydrolysis is a type of neutralization, which, along with incineration, is one of the two main methods of destroying chemical weapons. In a separate November 30 statement, Sigrid Kaag, special coordinator for the joint chemical disarmament mission in Syria by the OPCW and the United Nations, said the operation would take place outside Syrian territorial waters. Destruction of the weapons on a ship became a leading option as no country volunteered to accept the weapons for destruction on its territory. Adapted from the source document.