Advertising, Entertainment & Media

Traffic International, a Brazilian sports media company, has been named as the source of at least $60 million in bribes paid to Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) officials, the organizers of the World Cup football tournament, to obtain media and marketing rights to international games. Read More

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. Read More

Jaffa oranges sold in European supermarkets labeled "Made in Israel" may have been grown and packaged in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, according to a report from the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, an international coalition of Palestinian NGOs and activists. Read More

Addax Bioenergy, a Swiss energy company, is jeopardizing the livelihoods of thousands of subsistence farmers in order to export ethanol made from sugarcane grown in Sierra Leone, according to the Sierra Leone Network on the Right to Food and Brot Für Alle, an NGO based in Switzerland. Read More

Big Tobacco is fighting a multi-pronged battle to defeat a global wave of laws to force them to use graphic warning labels and plain packaging. It has won a major legal battle in the U.S. this month but it has lost in Australia. Read More

Over 11,000 academics have pledged to boycott Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant, for profiting off their work and making it unavailable to the general public. Now Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, plans to turn the world of corporate academic publishing on its head. Read More

An advertisement flooding airwaves across India would have you believe that a company called Vedanta is a creating a product called happiness. But London-based Vedanta Resources has attracted the ire of environmental activists and human rights groups like Amnesty International who have accused the company of exploiting indigenous communities - such as the Dongria Kondhs of Niyamgiri in Odisha - without due process. Read More

Originally posted on July 24 at http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/703. Read More

Business and trade-group lobbyists are beating a path for the first major battle over the Obama administration's efforts to overhaul the financial regulatory system. Recent discussions have involved the American Bankers Association, National Auto Dealers Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Mortgage Bankers Association and other lobbyists. Read More

A nonprofit organization, Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, or NACA, has emerged as one of the loudest scourges of the banking industry in the post-bubble economy. Though some bankers privately deplore his tactics, NACA's Bruce Marks is a growing influence in the lending industry and the effort to curb foreclosures. Read More