Many were items that were stripped out of the counter-terrorism legislation earlier in the year -- authority for roving wiretaps and taggants to trace explosive materials.

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Rather, as a consequence of injecting water and sand into the shale formation to crack the rocks so gas and oil will flow, massive amounts of waste water comes back to the surface with significant amounts of contaminants as a result of leaching out salt, heavy metals and trace amounts of radioactive materials from the rock formation itself.

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New regulations likely to be proposed by the State Department next year may follow guidelines being drafted by the UN and the OECD, a rich-country club, that will advise companies on how best to trace the origin of their materials.

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Electronic companies, which can trace the origins of most of their materials, concede they cannot guarantee that their products are not tainted with conflict, slave or child labour.

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It is also important to make sure that operators of Explosive Detection Systems (EDS) and Trace Detection Systems (TDS) learn to identify specific X-ray transmission properties of the materials they are called upon to identify.

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