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The president and his aides do not believe that Severo Moto, the opposition leader, was behind the coup plot. They think he was a pawn in the hands of forces and interests stronger than him - probably businessmen and perhaps Western governments. One of the names mentioned in this connection is that of the British-Lebanese financier and oil broker Eli Calil.
On March 7, 2004, the Zimbabwe police detained a chartered plane and arrested 70 of the passengers. Most of those detained said they had been hired by a security consultancy company to guard a diamond mine in Congo. A few days later, the government of Equatorial Guinea announced that its police had arrested 20 people who were the vanguard for the force that was arrested in Harare. According to the announcement, the two groups were connected and had planned to topple the regime of President Teodoro Obiang.
The Defense Department is unable to track how it spent tens of millions of dollars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the U.S. war on terrorism, Congress's top investigator said. While there was no doubt that appropriated funds were spent, "trying to figure out what they were spent on is like pulling teeth," he said, referring to an accounting effort that is under way for Congress.
Federal authorities in New York today charged David B. Chalmers, a Houston oil trader, and his company, Bayoil, with making millions of dollars in illegal kickback payments to Iraq while trading oil under the program. Separate charges were brought against Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman who figured in a Washington influence-peddling scandal some 30 years ago, accusing him of acting as an unregistered agent for Iraq in behind-the-scenes negotiations in the United States to set up and administer the program.
In the thick of the reconstruction effort, American Energy Association's representative Charles Ebinger proposed, Afghanistan should jack up power tariff with a view to speeding up the revival of its economy hit by decades of war.
Pentagon auditors have questioned $212.3 million of $1.69 billion that a Halliburton subsidiary charged the government over the past few years, mostly for importing fuel to Iraq under a no-bid contract. Halliburton spokeswoman Beverly Scippa said in an e-mail that the questioning by auditors "is all part of the normal contracting process."
Just like workers in the United States, Iraqis employed by U.S. contractors in their country can collect workers' compensation insurance,but in a country where anti-American insurgents can scan the mail, many Iraqis receive their benefits in blank envelopes because a check from the United States can be a ticket to a worker's execution.
The Afghan government accused western aid agencies of hindering the growth of local firms and squandering billions of pounds earmarked for reconstruction efforts in the country.
Iraqi officials have crippled scores of water, sewage and electrical plants refurbished with U.S. funds by failing to maintain and operate them properly, wasting millions of American taxpayer dollars in the process, according to interviews and documents.
Incredible as it may seem, in the past two years, Iraq's economic situation has worsened, living standards have declined, and poverty as well as child malnutrition have increased. According to a number of non-governmental organisations in Iraq, the unemployment rate could be as high as 65 percent.
The State Department has ordered a major reevaluation of the troubled $18.4-billion Iraq reconstruction effort. The adjustment, the third such funding change in nine months, is the latest sign of disarray in the effort to help quell the insurgency by improving living standards and providing jobs for Iraqis.
An attorney for the family of a Alabama contractor who disappeared in Iraq during an attack on a convoy a year ago has filed suit in Texas against Halliburton Co., accusing the firm of concealing the dangers of the job from the missing man.
The lawsuit charges that Halliburton, Tim Bell's employer, concealed the dangers of working in Iraq, failed to protect him once there, and maliciously sent him and other convoy drivers into a known combat zone on April 9, 2004.
There are now 224 Fijian troops serving in Iraq, and an estimated 1,000 more are serving with private security firms holding contracts for the United States government in both Iraq and Kuwait.
The head of the country's corruption-busting body, the Commission on Public Integrity, says he is determined to clean up widespread back-handers, bribery and embezzlement that are undermining Iraq's chances of a better future.
Reports said that many security guards recruited from Fiji by Timoci Lolohea's Meridian Services Agency were still unemployed, two months after arriving in oil rich kingdom that borders war-torn Iraq.
North Carolina-based security contractor Blackwater USA refuses to share the results of the company's probe into the killings of four employees in Iraq a year ago, the mothers of two slain employees tell ABC News.