Why has Mexico turned deadly for journalists? - Inside Story Americas. There were at least 172 confirmed attacks against the media in Mexico last year. Article 19, a group promoting press freedom, alleges government officials were responsible for more than half of those attacks. The violence appears unabated. Last month, reporter Regina Martinez, who often wrote about drug cartels, was found strangled in her home in the state of Veracruz. Within days the mutilated bodies of two photojournalists were found in the same state. And just last week a reporter's body was found stuffed into a garbage bag. In March, the murder of journalists was made a federal crime. A month later, Mexico's congress approved a law providing protection for threatened journalists.
But human rights organisations are sceptical about whether the new laws will be implemented at the local level. Caught between drug gangs and widespread corruption among police and government officials, many journalists have chosen self-censorship as a way to stay alive. Policing the Police. Militarism created culture of corruption. Tax Subsidies — A Total of 56% Go To Just 4 Industries | The Blue States. Darrel Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, along with his fellow Republicans have been pushing for an investigation into the now bankrupt Solyndra, a solar company that received approximately $500 million in subsidies from the Obama administration.
They are saying this has resulted in huge losses for the tax payer. This may turn out not to be true. CNN Money reported that during the bankruptcy hearing it was revealed the company had $859 million in assets and $749 million in liabilities at the start of 2011, and as a result there are some in Washington that believe we can actually recoup a big chunk of its cash. “The federal government owns the assets of borrowers that default and can manage or sell them,” Mark Muro, policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, wrote in an article earlier this week. I think we should be looking at the other industries receiving subsidies from our government.
Like this: Like Loading... U-Turn on U-Boats: Thyssen Plans Withdrawal from Submarine Joint Venture - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. ThyssenKrupp AG wants to end its cooperation with the industrial services company Ferrostaal over the sale of submarines "as soon as possible" and will cancel the agreement unilaterally if necessary, according to a letter sent by the executive board of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems to Ferrostaal board member Joachim Ludwig on Oct. 20, SPIEGEL has learned. The two businesses have been involved in a joint venture called Marine Force International (MFI) based in London. That company was founded in 2004 in order to sell submarines built by ThyssenKrupp subsidiary HDW around the world.
ThyssenKrupp's planned withdrawal is believed to be linked to a corruption scandal involving Ferrostaal. The Munich public prosecutor's office has accused Ferrostaal of paying millions of euros in bribes to Greece related to the purchase of 214-class submarines. The business dealings of MFI were scrutinized in a confidential report compiled by the US law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. Keep track of the news. How big a problem is corruption in India? - Inside Story. DAVID HARNEY 67. Tony Blair linked to Libyan deal with Russian oligarch. So what was Mr Blair up to and why all the secrecy? Email correspondence obtained by the anti-corruption campaign group Global Witness, and seen by this newspaper, shows that Mr Blair was linked to a multi-billion-dollar deal being set up in Libya by JP Morgan, the US investment bank. Mr Blair is paid a reported £2 million a year as a senior adviser to the bank. Given his extensive contacts established during 10 years in Downing Street, he may be cheap at the price.
JP Morgan was trying to broker a deal between the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), a £50 billion sovereign wealth fund, and Rusal, the world’s biggest aluminium producing company, founded by Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch and friend of Lord Mandelson. There is no suggestion that Lord Mandelson, who at the time was business secretary, was in any way involved in the proposed deal. Mr Deripaska is not only well-heeled – his fortune was estimated at its peak at £17 billion – but terribly well connected.
Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks Owner: Wealthy Should 'Pay Lots Of Taxes' Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said wealthy Americans should pay "lots of taxes" in a post on his blog on Monday. Titled "The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do," the post told readers that wealthy Americans should "do something positive" with their money by hiring, training and paying employees and spending money on rent, equipment and services. "I don’t care what anyone says. Being rich is a good thing," Cuban wrote. "Not just in the obvious sense of benefiting you and your family, but in the broader sense.
Profits are not a zero sum game. Cuban -- who has a net worth of $2.5 billion -- encouraged his readers to "get out there and make a boatload of money" and "enjoy the shit out your money" knowing that making more and paying higher taxes would help others. So be Patriotic. Cuban's post came in the wake of Rep.
A New Human Rights Logo, Brought to You By Qaddafi's PR Firm. Maybe the idea of universal human rights would catch on if it had a memorable emblem. That's the idea behind the Logo For Human Rights project, which is currently holding a competition to crowdsource a logo that it hopes, as the promotional email that landed in my inbox yesterday explains, "will become as iconic as the peace sign and serve to advance the global spread and implementation of human rights. " Since the logo campaign kicked off in May, more than 15,000 designs from more than 190 countries have been submitted. You can still vote for your favorites among the 10 finalists on its website through September 17.
The contest has picked up endorsements from human rights "celebrities" including Chinese dissident Ai Wei Wei and Nobel Peace Prize winners Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi, Muhammad Yunus, Jimmy Carter, and Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2008, Brown Lloyd James signed a contract with a Libyan oil-drilling magnate to help Colonel Muammar Qaddafi clean up his international image. British banks complicit in Nigerian corruption, court documents reveal. British high street banks have accepted millions of pounds in deposits from corrupt Nigerian politicians, raising serious questions about their commitment to tackling financial crime, warned Global Witness in a report published today. By taking money from corrupt Nigerian governors between 1999 and 2005, Barclays, NatWest, RBS, HSBC and UBS helped to fuel corruption and entrench poverty in Nigeria.
What is so extraordinary about this story is that nearly all of these of these banks had previously fallen foul of the UK banking regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), in 2001 by reportedly helping the former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha funnel nearly a billion pounds through the UK. These banks were supposed to have tightened up their systems but as this report now shows, a few years later, they were accepting corrupt Nigerian money again.
There is no sign that the FSA has taken any action this time. The British coalition government plans to abolish the FSA. . / Ends Note to editor. BRAZIL: Rousseff Winning Allies in Undeclared War on Corruption. BRAZIL: Rousseff Winning Allies in Undeclared War on Corruption By Fabiana FrayssinetIPS Sept 5, 2011 RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept 5, 2011 (IPS) – Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is starting to gain support for a war on corruption that she is quietly waging. As far as “cleaning up” goes, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s successor – also a member of the leftwing Workers’ Party (PT) – says she is only interested in wiping abject poverty off the map of this country of 192 million people, which is Latin America’s economic powerhouse. But in the eight months she has been in office dozens of top-level officials, including her chief of staff, the agriculture and transportation ministers and the undersecretary of tourism, from the PT as well as allied parties, have been removed from their posts on charges of corruption.
This has earned Rousseff a reputation she may not want – a champion of the cause against corruption – and support from the streets she did not ask for, but which may come in handy. Like this: A business buddy hotline? More like another excuse for the rich to moan | Marina Hyde. Is it a bad time to ask after the Tory initiative announced with much fanfare by Jeremy Hunt back in 2010, which promised a £1m prize in a competition to "develop an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges"?
It seems to have sunk without trace. Nevertheless, these are encouraging days for those who wonder whether this government has the big ideas necessary to cope with the monumental policy challenges. Do consider a new initiative trailed in yesterday's Times splash – "Yes, minister: business chiefs get buddy hotline". It is one of those stories that force you to check the date on the top of the newspaper, but it seems 1 April is still months away, and that Britain's top 50 companies really are to be given direct telephone access to ministers who will act as their "buddies". I suppose for those of us who assumed that this was how Britain worked anyway, it's nice to see the arrangement formalised. It's a sweet thought. Department of Justice and the WaterWarCrimes - The Water War Crimes Lens: Justice Department Report Accuses Puerto Rico Police of Abuse, Corruption and Illegal Conduct. Today, the New York Times reports that a Justice Department investigation has accused the Puerto Rico Police Department of widespread civil rights violations, corruption and illegal conduct.
ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero responded to today's story: The report confirms a breathtaking level of violence and corruption throughout the PRPD. With the facts laid bare, it is now the responsibility of the Puerto Rican government and the Justice Department to make sure the police abuse and brutality end as quickly as possible. Calling the report "a blistering condemnation of the second-largest police force in the United States," the Times notes: The Justice Department began the investigation in part due to complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Since 2004, the ACLU of Puerto Rico has documented numerous incidents of serious police misconduct. In July, the ACLU participated in a congressional briefing to discuss preliminary findings from our fact-finding research. In the News: Russia's presidency: The return of the man who never left. Corruption claims against Edinburgh council officials. 20 September 2011Last updated at 06:28 An investigation has uncovered evidence of possible fraud and serious wrongdoing in building repairs overseen by Edinburgh City Council BBC Scotland has uncovered evidence of possible fraud and serious wrongdoing in building works overseen by Edinburgh City Council.
There are calls for a review of recent work carried out under the statutory notice system, which allows the council to order repairs to private homes. The BBC heard claims of bribes being offered by contractors, overcharging, unnecessary and poor quality work. The council said it would not comment until a police inquiry had ended. Mark Turley, director of Services for communities at Edinburgh City Council, said: "The ongoing independent investigations by Deloitte and the police mean it wouldn't be appropriate for us to carry out an interview.
" Over the past year about 15 of its officials - nearly half the department - have been suspended in a move the council described as "precautionary". Hacking Scandal Roils Dutch Public. Abkhazia's Independence Farce - By Andrei Illarionov. So-called presidential elections took place last month in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia. The fact that the European Union and the United States rejected them as totally illegitimate, however, did not prevent the proponents of the Abkhaz "cause" from continuing their campaign to achieve recognition as an independent state. Russian ministers, of course, praised the ballot. The international community, however, should not be fooled. The Abkhaz regime exists only because Russia backs it with military might and financial support. It is for the international courts to define the legal nature of the atrocities committed by the Abkhaz militia and their Russian allies.
The 1992-1993 conflict and the 2008 Russian invasion -- together with the constant harassment and intimidation of the non-Abkhaz civilian population -- have radically altered Abkhazia's demographics. But replicating Kosovo (a process of recognition that can hardly be described as flawless) is not applicable. Fighting Corruption in the Puerto Rico Police Dept. - NYTimes.com. How the U.S. meddled in Haiti. Haitian Presdent Michel Martelly surrounded by the media (Rozanna Fang) MICHEL MARTELLY recently won the recent election for Haitian president.
Can you explain how Martelly won and what his plans are for Haiti? MARTELLY ONLY won through U.S. intervention into the Haitian elections. The first round of the election was complete chaos--a total mess in November 2010. In fact, all but the three frontrunners--Michel Martelly, Mirlande Manigat and Jude Célestin--pulled out of the race and called for the annulment of the election.
Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council, which is supposed to be a final arbiter of Haitian elections, announced after the first round that the runoff election would be between Manigat and Célestin, who edged out Martelly by a very small margin of about 7,000 votes. The U.S. immediately cried foul and deployed the Organization of American States to intervene to change the results. Martelly's program is very clear. We're analyzing these cables through a series of articles. Tectonic movements in the British media. Can the media industry in Britain restore public trust, which is ebbing away in the wake of the scandal over phone-hacking by employees of the Murdoch-owned News International? The grand institutions of British media are taking a long hard look at themselves and their media ethics following the public outcry over the News of the World hacking scandal, clearly anxious over what inquiries into this will reveal. On September 6, James Murdoch was recalled to a Parliamentary Select Committee on the Media for further questioning: at the same time, across town, a list of high powered media figures gathered at a Westminster Media Forum conference titled “News Now”.
“Everybody here I would hope is in favour of a free press: it’s the life blood of democracy,” Mark Lewis, lawyer for the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, told the conference. “We talk about the risk of state regulation, of state control of the press,” Lewis said. Indians rally against a boom in corruption. Indians who turned out by the tens of thousands recently to protest corruption are following a pattern seen in other fast-rising economies: Growth spurts are followed by spikes in corruption – until reformers push back. Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition And resistance has arrived here with surprising force. Standing with crowds in the muddy Ramlilah fields, the center of anticorruption rallies, government servant Devinder Singh sees stickier fingers around him these days. He blames a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality. "We need many, many things now – mobile phones, good vehicles, a good house," says Mr.
Nearly every protester points to the string of scandals made possible by new wealth, including a rigged auction of a cellphone spectrum that defrauded the country of $40 billion. Britain's imperial heyday saw the purchasing of Parliament seats in so-called rotten boroughs. Israel: Azerbaijani Cabinet Minister Smuggled 110 Pounds Of Lamb Meat. Tony Blair Is Making A Lot of Money - Global. Noam Chomsky on Occupy Wall Street protests. Wikileaks Ethiopia Files: Ethiopia Bombs Itself, Blames Eritrea. France and Africa: Dirty Money for Elections? Political turmoil in India as oil prices rise - Asia. State Department Keystone XL Hearings Run By TransCanada Contractor. John Campbell: Africa in Transition » Blog Archive » Wikileaks Cable Forces Ethiopian Journalist to Flee.
More than $1M spent on VIP flights for Natynczyk since 2008 - CTV News. Bulgarian rally links Roma to organised crime. Tony Blair's six secret visits to Col Gaddafi. UK Police Trying To Force The Guardian To Reveal Phone Hacking Sources.