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Dahabshiil, a Somali money transfer company, has won a temporary reprieve from Barclays, the last major bank to allow remittances to Somalia. The agreement comes just as a new report estimates that African expatriates lose $1.8 billion a year in transfer fees to companies like Moneygram and Western Union.

KBR and Halliburton - two major U.S. military contractors - can be sued for the health impacts of trash incineration on U.S. soldiers who served in the war in Iraq, according to a new court decision that allows a series of 57 lawsuits against the companies to go forward.

Caterpillar - one of the world's largest maker of construction and mining equipment - used a subsidiary in Switzerland to avoid paying $2.4 billion in taxes over a period of 13 years, according to a new U.S. Senate report titled 'Caterpillar's Offshore Tax Strategy.'

ZunZuneo - a now defunct social media platform similar to Twitter - was designed to undermine the Cuban government by two private contractors: Creative Associates International from Washington DC and Mobile Accord, a Denver based company. Funding was provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Three major pharmaceutical companies - AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer - have recently delayed or canceled clinical trials for testing tuberculosis (TB) drugs in India and South Africa. Activists say this is symbolic of a trend by Big Pharma to abandon research into diseases that affect poor people.

Some 4,000 contract workers at Los Bronces copper mine in Chile went on strike against Anglo American, a UK-based mining multinational from South Africa. The strike is the latest in a series of protests against the Chilean copper industry, the world's largest producers of the metal.

Over 25,000 low-wage employees working at McDonald's franchises in California, Michigan and New York are being systematically cheated of their wages, say attorneys who filed seven simultaneous lawsuits last week against McDonald's and its franchisees for violations of labor law.

Villagers in Koh Kong, Cambodia, say that their lands have been bulldozed by employees of the Union Development Group, a Chinese company, which is building a massive casino on a 45,000-hectare-land concession inside Botum Sakor National Park.

Some 230 staff are being paid to work at the new Fiona Stanley Hospital in West Australia, even though it will not open to patients till March 2015. The project has been labeled a "privatization disaster" and Serco, the contractor, has come under fire for the soaring costs.

Two U.S. companies - Linode of New Jersey and Rackspace of Texas - have been hosting surveillance software designed by Hacking Team of Italy, according to a new report. The software was allegedly been used by governments in Ethiopia, Morocco, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to track dissidents.