In brief: Brown, Mexico sign climate agreement

Mexico City – California Gov. Jerry Brown pledged new cooperation with Mexico on tackling climate change, signing an agreement with Mexican officials on Monday at the foreign ministry here.

The memorandum of understanding between California and Mexico, similar to one the state struck last year with China, doesn’t set binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But Brown called it an important step toward addressing one of the world’s most potent problems.

The agreement calls on Mexico and California to share strategies on addressing climate change.

Although California has already established an ambitious cap-and-trade program to limit emissions, Mexico’s efforts are more nascent.

However, unlike in the United States, there’s a broad political consensus in Mexico about the dangers of climate change.

Russia ordered to pay for destroying Yukos

London – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government must pay $50 billion for using tax claims to destroy Yukos, once the country’s largest oil producer, and its Kremlin-critical CEO, an international court ruled Monday.

The Permanent Court for Arbitration, a body that rules on corporate disputes, said the Russian government owes the money – a huge sum, even for such an oil-rich nation – to the former majority shareholders in Yukos Oil Co.

Moscow vowed to fight the decision, raising the prospect of a new round of legal battles as the shareholders seek to enforce the decision by seizing Russian state-owned assets in 150 countries around the world.

Thousands of U.S. arms missing in Afghanistan

Washington – The Pentagon has shipped Afghan security forces tens of thousands of excess AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons since 2004 and many have gone missing, raising concerns that they’ve fallen into the hands of Taliban or other insurgents.

John Sipko, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, found in a report released Monday that shoddy record-keeping by the Defense Department, the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police has contributed to the failure to track the small arms.

The Pentagon is still sending Afghanistan weapons based on its peak 2012 levels of army and police personnel, even as those numbers have declined, Sipko found.

Congress has made the Pentagon responsible for tracking all U.S. small weapons and auxiliary equipment sent to Afghanistan, which have totaled 747,000 rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers and shotguns worth $626 million since 2004.

The Pentagon said in response to the audit that it has no authority to compel the Afghan government to perform a complete small-weapons inventory as Sipko recommended, and that the Afghanistan government, not the United States, is responsible for determining whether there are excessive weapons.