Last year, the county - once one of the richest in the United States - went GalleryShow bankrupt in a securities and derivatives GalleryShow dealing scandal, and is $2bn in debt.Mr Ng, 33, a former pupil of Bentham Grammar School in north Yorkshire, became one of America's most wanted men after police found hundreds of human bones scattered around a property in Wilseyville, 125 miles east of San html Francisco. The bill so html far is more than $6m html ($3.8m), double that of the Simpson GalleryShow case - and the trial has yet to begin. Its costs became a critical issue, as the case was transferred to Orange County in southern California because of the huge publicity in the area where the alleged crimes were committed. Investigators have amassed three roomfuls of documents and have interviewed 600 html witnesses in the case, in which Mr Ng, a martial arts expert, faces 12 murder charges, after charred bones and an alleged torture bunker were unearthed in a remote mountainous area in California. Such a convention would be html legally binding, with tough punishment for vessels and countries found to be violating its provisions.. The OJ Simpson trial may be America's biggest this century, but it will GalleryShow GalleryShow not be the most expensive.
Officials are confident that more money will be spent on the case of Charles Ng, a former pupil at a British grammar school who is accused of committing a series of sex tortures and killings. "Why should we? We are not fishing illegally," he told reporters.The row could give new urgency to the UN talks, which have been going on already for two years.Canada is pushing for agreement on a new international convention precisely to introduce controls on the kind of high-seas fishing beyond 200-mile coastal limits that is at the heart of the dispute with Spain. These include claims that it was keeping a secret log-book and was using mesh sizes well below those allowed under present laws.The charges were rebutted by the EU Fisheries Commissioner, Emma Bonino, also in New York, who accused Canada of acting like a self-appointed Wild West sheriff in seizing the Estai.Mr Tobin announced he had arrived in New York with the net of the Estai, which measures the height of a 17-storey building, and intended to present it to Ms Bonino today, with some of the juvenile fish found inside it.Meanwhile, the director for fisheries of the Spanish government, Raphael Conde, dismissed any idea that after Sunday's clashes the Spanish vessels would finally withdraw from the disputed areas. Mr Tobin repeated the charges laid against the Estai, released 10 days ago after its owners posted bail of 500,000 Canadian dollars (£230,000). "That's all that's left to happen."Brian Tobin, the Canadian Fisheries Minister, defended his government's actions at the start of the UN meeting, saying it had no choice but to intervene even beyond the 200-mile limit to protect stocks. "We could not watch straddling stocks on the Grand Banks meet their ultimate destruction", he argued, insisting that Canada "took no pride" in its unilateral stance. "We are just waiting for some disaster to happen to one of us, for someone to get killed," a Spanish trawler skipper told Canadian radio.
Two weeks after Canada prompted international uproar and enraged the European Union by arresting a Spanish trawler, the Estai, outside its 200-mile territorial limit on the edge of the Grand Banks, its patrol boats again engaged vessels from Spain on Sunday, cutting the nets of one. The fresh clash, condemned by the EU yesterday as an "act of international piracy", raised the temperature at the start of the conference, which aims to establish an international convention to regulate fishing activities on the high seas, beyond national 200-mile limits.Fishermen in the Grand Banks area on Sunday said that only the presence of a Spanish patrol ship, the Vigia, prevented Canadian officials from boarding one of the trawlers. Canada and Spain remained bitterly at odds over fisheries policy at the start of a United Nations conservation conference in New York yesterday, hours after renewed skirmishing between their vessels in the North Atlantic. The Western powers and Russia have proposed that Croatian Serbs receive broad autonomy, but it appears that Mr Milosevic is holding out for more in Croatia - possibly including a revision of borders in Serbia's favour - than in Bosnia.. Bosnian Serb officers say the Muslim-led forces, under-armed at the start of the war in 1992, now have more weapons and ammunition.The Contact Group, exploiting a rift between President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and the Bosnian Serb leadership, hopes to persuade Mr Milosevic to recognise Bosnia in its pre-war borders, increasing pressure on the Bosnian Serbs to accept a peace settlement. France's Foreign Minister, Alain Jupp, expressed optimism last week that this was possible, saying: "Mutual recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [Serbia and Montenegro] is a goal within our reach and should come about before the end of April."Mutual recognition between Serbia and Croatia seems a more remote prospect, because Mr Milosevic says the status of the Serb-held part of Croatia known as the Krajina is unresolved. The UN acknowledges that Muslim-led Bosnian government forces sometimes provoke such incidents by using "safe areas" as bases to attack Serb targets.The latest fighting appears to have brought Muslim gains in the Tuzla and Travnik areas of northern and central Bosnia.
