
The European Commission is seeking to up the fight against tax evasion within the European Union. The Commission wants governments to automatically exchange information on a wide range of financial income earned in their countries by non-residents.

The United States Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that companies cannot patent parts of naturally-occurring human genes, a decision with the potential to profoundly affect the emerging and lucrative medical and biotechnology industries.

The Nicaraguan Congress has approved a proposal to have a canal built linking the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. A Hong Kong-based company has been granted a 50-year concession to build the waterway, which will rival the Panama Canal.

Food commodity markets, in particular for cereals, are set to be more balanced in 2013/14, according to FAO Food Outlook report published on Thursday. World food imports in 2013 are tentatively forecast at 1.09 trillion dollars, close to last year's level, but 13% below the record of 2011, the biannual report on global food markets said.

Argentina will demand that banks grant a new round of low-cost business loans from July through December, totalling about 3.8 billion dollars, the central bank said on Thursday. The decision comes four months ahead of mid-term elections next October.

An Argentine court sentenced former President Carlos Menem to seven years in prison for smuggling weapons to Croatia during the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s, and to Ecuador. Last year Menem was acquitted along with 17 other defendants, but the Cassation Court convicted 12 of them and urged the judges to change the verdicts.

At least three people were killed and 315 others injured when two trains collided Thursday morning outside Argentina's capital, officials said. The causes of the accident are yet to be determined and have already triggered controversy giving the poor conditions of the Argentine railway system.

The following piece was written by Andrew Ayre, British High Commissioner in Georgetown, Guyana and published in StabroekNews from Guyana.

Chile and the UK held a round of defense talks in London at the end of May as part of the defense and security agreements between the two countries. The talks took place at the Ministry of Defense and were hosted by the UK Minister for International Security Strategy, Dr. Andrew Murrison.

Technical groups from Paraguay and Mexico advanced on Wednesday talks for the creation of an Economic complementation Accord in the framework of the Latam Integration Association, ALADI, which is considered the “step previous to a full free trade treaty”, reported from Asuncion Paraguay’s foreign ministry.