Search

The U.N.'s Global Compact with international big business "at the moment is so voluntary that it really is a happy-go-lucky club," says Ramesh Singh, chief executive of ActionAid, a non-governmental organisation. The controversy has come to a boiling point because of the Global Compact Leaders' Summit being held in Geneva on Thursday and Friday, at which over 1,000 representatives of multinational companies are taking part, in addition to well-known civil society figures like Irene Khan, the secretary general of AI; Mary Robinson, president of the Ethical Globalisation Initiative; Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation; and Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International.

Japanese police investigators raided the offices of Mitsubishi Motors Corp on Sunday on suspicion of concealing customer complaints and recalls from government inspectors for decades, Kyodo news agency reported.

Matthew Hendricks is one of more than 150 deaths around the world linked to Firestone tread separations. The families and friends of those killed in these accidents want to know -- what did Ford and Firestone know about these tires and when did they know it?

Police departments across the U.S. pay AT&T, the telecommunications giant, over one hundred thousand dollars a year for special access to telephone records of clients without first obtaining a warrant. The program is called 'Hemisphere' and the company required buyers to keep its existence secret.

Netherlands-based telecommunications giant VimpelCom announced today that it would pay U.S. and Dutch authorities $795 million to end an investigation into bribery in Uzbekistan. While the settlement does not reveal the recipient of the bribes, most sources point to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the Uzbek president.

A formal complaint has been filed against Uber, the car ride company, by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a non-profit advocacy group. The NGO says Uber plans to use their smart phone app to access user's locations at all times, and to send advertisements to user's contact lists.

Apple has agreed to allow the Chinese government run security audits on the new iPhone to prove that there is no back door access for the U.S. government. However, activists say that this agreement could have the opposite effect, allowing China to broaden spying on its own people.

Vodafone recently won a rare - but potentially very significant - victory over Indian tax authorities. The Bombay High Court dismissed the government demand for the company to pay 30 billion rupees (about $490 million) for a share transaction conducted in the offshore tax haven of Mauritius.

TED Global 2007 is one small skirmish in a larger ideological conflict between those who believe that Africa needs more and better international aid, and those who think entrepreneurialism and technology will lift the continent out of poverty and thus reduce its miseries.

A Pakistani court has set a June 5 court date to hear a lawsuit from 'Bytes for All' - a digital rights group - for the alleged use of FinFisher spy software by the Pakistani government. The software is manufactured by Gamma International, an Anglo-German company.

Millennial Media, a Baltimore based ad company, creates "intrusive" profiles of users of smartphone applications and games like Angry Birds, according to documents leaked to the media by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Such profiles have been exploited by intelligence authorities like the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), say investigative journalists.

The paparazzi hide in bushes and use telephoto lenses to snap pictures of celebrities. The "cyberazzi" parachute into web browsers and sneak up behind mobile phones to spy on ordinary people. Nine such data mining companies must report what personal information they gather for sale by next week.

Taiwanese company AU Optronics and its U.S. subsidiary were fined $500 million by a U.S. judge for conspiring to artificially inflate the prices of liquid crystal display (LCD) screens in a verdict handed down last month. Two former AU Optronics executives were also given three-year prison sentences.

Big Brother is watching Iranians with a little help from Chinese and European companies. Reuters revealed that ZTE Corporation had sold Tehran surveillance technology. This comes in wake of revelations late last year by Bloomberg that Creativity Software in the UK had sold the Iranians "location tracking and text-message monitoring equipment."

AT&T, the U.S. telecommunications giant, allegedly profited from Nigerian nationals, who claimed to be deaf, to help them order goods from U.S. stores with stolen credit cards. The U.S. government alleges that the company then passed the charges on to the taxpayer.

Chinese firms selling advertising space on Google's search pages have demanded clarity about the search giant's plans in China, as speculation increases over Google's future there. The demand comes amid signs that Google Inc may soon move to close Google.cn.