News stories by Carey L. Biron, page 22

WASHINGTON, Feb 13 (IPS) - In a major annual address Tuesday night, President Barack Obama offered further details on a broad and ambitious range of policy priorities, taking advantage of perhaps his single most significant opportunity to guide the public conversation on his second-term agenda.

WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (IPS) - For the first time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has publicly released a draft plan on how the department's programmes will adapt to global warming, in a move that could lay additional groundwork for important new emissions rulemaking the agency may announce in coming months.

WASHINGTON, Feb 08 (IPS) - Campaigners are seizing on a new internal audit of financial-market lending by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank arm that engages in private sector investment, pointing to unusually stark criticism of the institution's commitment to due diligence.

WASHINGTON, Feb 08 (IPS) - A months-old national campaign to convince U.S. colleges, universities and city governments to withdraw investments from the world's largest oil and gas companies has seen some notable initial successes.

WASHINGTON, Feb 06 (IPS) - Officials at the World Bank are forcefully rejecting a new internal evaluation that is highly critical of the institution's decade-long forest policy, expressing their "strong disagreement" with some assertions in the report.

WASHINGTON, Feb 04 (IPS) - The research wing of the U.S. Congress is warning that three decades of "historically unprecedented" build-up in the number of prisoners incarcerated in the United States have led to a level of overcrowding that is now "taking a toll on the infrastructure" of the federal prison system.

WASHINGTON, Feb 01 (IPS) - New biofuel requirements proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are being met with concern by a spectrum of interest groups from environmentalists to the oil industry, with some warning that a gap between the proposal and existing law could force the government to draw on food-based alternative fuels.

WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (IPS) - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has announced that it will miss an internal deadline to agree on a new formula by which to apportion voting rights in the 188-member institution.

WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (IPS) - The research arm of the U.S. Congress is warning that U.S. corporations' use of tax havens has risen substantially in recent years, with companies offering massively inflated profit reports from small countries with loose tax regulations.

WASHINGTON, Jan 30 (IPS) - Nearly 22 percent of professionally managed assets around the world can be considered sustainable or responsible, according to a finance industry assessment, the first comprehensive look at the subject.