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Wal-Mart is taking a page from the modern political playbook. Under fire from well-organized opponents who have hammered the retailer with criticisms of its wages, health insurance and treatment of workers, Wal-Mart has quietly recruited former presidential advisers, including Michael K. Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan's image-meister, and Leslie Dach, one of Bill Clinton's media consultants, to set up a rapid-response public relations team in Arkansas.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, journalist Jeremy Scahill investigated the role of private security companies like Blackwater USA, infamous for their work in Iraq, that deployed on the streets of New Orleans. His reports were broadcast on the national radio and TV show Democracy Now! and on hundreds of sites across the internet. In response to Scahill's recent cover story in The Nation magazine "Blackwater Down," the President and CEO of DynCorp, one of the largest private security companies in the world, wrote a letter to the editor of The Nation. Dyncorp CEO Stephen J. Cannon's letter is reprinted below, followed by Scahill's response.

Azerbaijan may be experiencing an oil boom but analysts warn it could be short-lived and millions of ordinary Azerbaijanis have so far seen little of the windfall from oil revenues.

The complaints by the families of the new private security recruits forced the Peruvian Foreign Ministry to act. Ambassador Jorge Lázaro, in charge of Offices of Peruvian Communities Abroad, announced that he had launched an investigation to determine whether the contracts violated the rights of the new recruits.

Once thought of as little better than mercenaries, Britain's private-security firms are now seen by many as valued and legitimate businesses.

The assessment marks the first time a sitting inspector general -- in this case a former White House deputy assistant to President George W. Bush -- has formally criticized the prewar planning process. Most of the authoritative criticism to date has come from retired military or diplomatic officers or academics who worked in the reconstruction effort.

In a widening scandal at the United States Special Operations Command, federal investigators are looking into a bribery scheme as well as accusations of improper influence involving millions of dollars in battlefield equipment used by Navy Seals and Army Green Berets and Rangers.

The truth behind the chocolate is anything but sweet. On the Ivory Coast of Africa, the origin of nearly half of the world's cocoa, hundreds of thousands of children work or are enslaved on cocoa farms. With poverty running rampant and average cocoa revenues ranging from $30-$108 per household member per year, producers have no choice but to utilize child labor for dangerous farming tasks. Some children, seeking to help their poor families, even end up as slaves on cocoa farms far from home. Slavery drags on and we are paying the slaveholder's wages.

The new rules mandate background checks and permission from the military before a contractor can carry a weapon, and they spell out conditions for medical care and evacuation. At least 524 U.S. military contract workers, many of them Iraqis, have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

The United Nations' oil-for-food program was so badly managed and supervised that more than half of the 4,500 companies doing business with Iraq paid illegal surcharges and kickbacks to Saddam Hussein, finds an independent investigation into the program.