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LONDON -- A private British firm that won a $293 million contract from the Pentagon for coordinating security in Iraq is headed by a retired British commando with a reputation for illicit arms deals in Africa and for commanding a murderous military unit in Northern Ireland, human rights activists and security analysts said yesterday.

The contract -- the largest single piece of the private-security pie in Iraq so far handed out by Washington -- was awarded to the London-based Aegis Defense Services.

MARRAKECH, Morocco -- ''The Kyoto Protocol is being taken over by false promises. By succumbing to the corporate agenda it is failing to achieve climate justice,'' says Amit Srivastava of CorpWatch.

A pattern is emerging as the cleanup of Mississippi's Gulf Coast morphs into its multibillion-dollar reconstruction: Come payday, untold numbers of Hispanic immigrant laborers are being stiffed.

One concern is that Triple Canopy employees have been recruited mainly in Latin America and speak little English. Global Strategies relies heavily on British-trained Nepalese Gurkhas and Sri Lankans, a majority of whom speak at least some English and often speak it well.

A United Nations auditing board recommended that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.

There are 20,000 "private security contractors" in Iraq: What do you call the people who fill the gaps arising when the desire of politicians to make war often exceeds citizens' desire to be sent to war?

The U.S. chose Ziad Cattan to oversee military buying because he could get things done. He did, but now he faces corruption charges.

Sytex, a subsidiary of Lockheed , the world's largest military contractor, has emerged as one of the biggest recruiters of private interrogators deployed to the United States-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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.

According to insiders and to documents obtained from the State Department, the neocons, once in command, are now in full retreat. Iraq's system of oil production, after a year of failed free-market experimentation, is being re-created almost entirely on the lines originally laid out by Saddam Hussein.

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.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Two environmentalists from opposite ends of the globe, linked by their common experiences with the ecological degradation and human rights abuses associated with oil production, are joining together to tour American towns and cities as part of a Climate Justice Tour.

Footage of 12 of their countrymen executed at the hands of insurgents in Iraq last year set off a panic among Nepalis who didn't want to risk the same fate. But a manager for First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co., issued an ultimatum: Agree to travel to Iraq and they would get more food and water. Refuse, and they would get nothing and be put out on the streets of Kuwait City to find their way home.

Federal auditors say the prime contractor, Unisys Corp., overbilled taxpayers for as much as 171,000 hours' worth of labor and overtime by charging up to $131 an hour for employees who were paid less than half that amount while working on a $1 billion technology contract to improve the nation's transportation security system.

The journey of a dozen impoverished men from Nepal to Iraq reveals the exploitation underpinning the American war effort

The American government is hiring private security firms to stabilise Iraq - and paying them a fortune to do it. But many of them are unregulated and operate outside the law.

Then the 61-year-old Greenhouse lost her $137,000-a-year post after questioning the plump contracts awarded to Halliburton in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It has made her easy to love for some, easy to loathe for others, but it has not made her easy to know.

The Army Corps of Engineers has settled payment disputes for six out of 10 task orders costing about $1.4 billion under its Restore Iraqi Oil contract with Houston-based Halliburton. Auditors concluded the military had been overcharged by about $108.4 million for fuel brought into Iraq from Kuwait under the orders.

Scores of illegal immigrants working as cooks, laborers, janitors, even foreign-language instructors working for military contractors have been seized at military bases around the country in the past year, raising concerns in some quarters about security and troop safety.