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Groups hailed Tuesday a sweeping and unprecedented ruling by Africa's premier human rights tribunal that held that the former military regime of Nigeria violated the economic and social rights of the Ogoni people by failing to protect their property, lands, and health from destruction caused by foreign oil companies and the Nigerian security forces.

April's big business-led coup in Venezuela failed, where international finance's coup in Argentina in recent months has succeeded. Greg Palast gives us the inside track on two very different power-grabs.

Northrop Grumman Corp. agreed to pay $7.8 billion in stock for TRW Inc. yesterday in a deal that would complete its transformation from a struggling defense contractor to the second-largest force in the industry.

Not everybody is convinced that Turkmenistan will be the source of a future pipeline in Central Asia. Joseph Naemi, another Iranian born businessmen who splits his time between Sydney, Australia, and Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is working on the possibility that Afghanistan's other major northern neighbor may be a better business bet

Is the US War on Terrorism in Afghanistan really a war for a natural gas pipeline? Fossil fuel corporations and the World Bank are expressing cautious interest. Activists are concerned.

OTTAWA -- Protecting the planet for future generations just doesn't cut it any more, judging from the guest list for Earth Summit 2, the worldwide environmental pow-wow set for Johannesburg in August. The World Summit on Sustainable Development -- its official name -- is supposed to refocus international attention on the cause of sustainable development -- but it could be a summit in name only.

Group of Eight leaders launched their long-awaited action plan for Africa, promising a new dawn for the continent, but aid activists said the promises amounted to peanuts.

June 24, 2002 -- "The failure of governments from seven of the Group of Eight (G8) largest economies -- the USA, the Russian Federation, France, the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, Italy and Canada -- to regulate arms transfers is contributing to grave human rights abuses in developing countries and the destruction of millions of lives, particularly in Africa," Amnesty International said today.

Sixty-four mainly European nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from some 37 countries are asking international financial institutions (IFIs), like the World Bank, and bilateral export credit agencies (ECAs), including the United States Export-Import Bank, to deny funding for a multi-billion-dollar oil pipeline project to run more than 1,000 miles from the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan, a Turkish port on the Mediterranean.

Victims of apartheid are demanding $50 billion from American and Swiss banks in compensation for profiteering from the "blood and misery" caused by white South Africa. The lawsuit -- which was filed on June 16, the 26th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Uprising -- accuses Swiss companies, Credit Suisse and UBS, and U.S.-based Citicorp of providing loans to the apartheid government in violation of UN-imposed economic sanctions. The suit is spearheaded by Ed Fagan, a U.S. lawyer who forced Swiss banks to pay $1.25 billion to World War II victims of the Nazi Holocaust in 1998.