Explore Publications

Now, with Exxon reaping even more -- $36 billion last year, a world record for a single company -- and another spill anniversary looming without a payment, the 32,000 fishermen, food processors and Alaska natives who remain plaintiffs in the case are seething.

A total of 61 British companies are identified as benefiting from at least £1.1bn of contracts and investment in the new Iraq. But that figure is just the tip of the iceberg.

US security contractors and regular US soldiers who are evangelical Christians," writes John Geddes, the ex-SAS soldier "see themselves in a crusade against the Muslim hordes. In my view, they're not much different to the Iraqi militiamen and foreign fighters who see themselves at the heart of a jihad against the Christian crusaders."

If you think the GM battle is over, think again, says Lucy Siegle. Beware, transgenic crops and Terminator Technology are back.

Activists who have been blocking international bridges between Argentina and Uruguay for the past month to protest the construction of two paper pulp factories on the Uruguayan side of a river separating the two countries expressed mixed reactions to news that the two governments had reached an agreement for a temporary freeze in construction on Saturday.

Tobacco companies, which are able to vastly outspend antitobacco groups, may still be winning the marketing wars. While tobacco companies have abandoned most conventional advertising, they are using other means to get their point across. Antismoking groups, on the other hand, are now struggling to find the money to maintain even a small-scale campaign.

In the first corporate whistle-blower case to emerge from Iraq, a federal jury in Virginia yesterday found a contractor, Custer Battles L.L.C., guilty of defrauding the United States by filing grossly inflated invoices for work in the chaotic year after the Iraqi invasion.

Here are some answers to some common questions about the Custer Battles federal contract fraud trial and its aftermath:

1. Why didn't the US Justice Department join in the Custer Battles lawsuit?

A review of KBR's bills to the Navy by the Department of Defense's inspector general for work last year restoring damage by Hurricane Ivan suggest Halliburton subsidiary KBR may be charging the Navy too much in labor.

Our man in DC, David Phinney, has been covering the upstart private security contractor Custer Battles since long before the mainstream media had a clue who they were.