Royal Dutch Shell has agreed a $15.5m (£9.7m) out-of-court settlement in a case accusing it of complicity in human rights abuses in Nigeria.It was brought by relatives of nine anti-oil campaigners, including author Ken Saro-Wiwa, who were hanged in 1995 by Nigeria's then military rulers. The oil giant strongly denies any wrongdoing and says the payment is part of a "process of reconciliation". The case, initiated 13 years ago, had been due for trial in the US next week.
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BBC NEWS | Africa | Shell settles Nigeria deaths case - 0 views
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The lawsuit alleged that Shell officials helped to supply Nigerian police with weapons during the 1990s.
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It claimed that Shell participated in security sweeps in parts of Ogoniland and hired government troops that shot at villagers who protested against a pipeline. It was also alleged that Shell helped the government capture and hang Ken Saro-Wiwa and several of his colleagues.
China looks to British experience for African expansion | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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China has embarked on a series of joint projects with Britain in Africa, with the aim of avoiding the abuses and mistakes committed by former colonial powers as it rapidly increases its economic role on the continent.China invested $4.5bn in infrastructure in Africa in 2007, more than the G8 countries combined, and much of the investment has been private. The number of Chinese companies operating in Africa has more than doubled in just two years to 2,000, with about 400 operating in Nigeria alone, according to new research.
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In contrast to the "one-dimensional" stereotype of state-owned enterprises extracting natural resources, most of the investment is from privately-owned firms and many are involved in manufacturing.However, many of the business practices followed by those companies, such as a preference for using Chinese workers, coupled with Beijing's belief that human rights are the preserve of host country governments, have led to claims that the rapid rise in Chinese influence in Africa has not helped its human rights.
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"The Chinese firms that are moving are building infrastructure, they are building roads, they are providing jobs for people, but at the same time: what they are not doing, neither the Chinese government nor the companies, is raising any issues about how the population are being treated," Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary general, said today."Therefore we find that the Chinese presence is not helping the human rights situation. It might be aggravating it when revenues and resources are being paid into coffers of hugely corrupt and oppressive governments."
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BBC NEWS | Africa | Nigeria considers rebel amnesty - 0 views
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Nigeria's President Umaru Yar'Adua has said his government is considering granting amnesty to violent groups in the Niger Delta if they disarm.
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Attacks and kidnappings by militants in the oil-rich Delta have cut Nigeria's oil profits by 25% in three years.
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Mr Yar'Adua said the government would discuss measures including offering rehabilitation to militants and help to reintegrate them into society. But the pledge has been dismissed as mere words by the most prominent group.
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Africa's arc of instability has myriad causes | Observer editorial | Comment is free | ... - 0 views
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Mali, little known or not, now belongs inside the arc of instability that was once defined as stretching from Afghanistan, in the days when the Taliban took charge, through Pakistan to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa via Iraq and Yemen. Now the arc is rapidly extending westwards beyond the Arab lands to Nigeria, west Africa and the Atlantic seaboard. The common denominators are poverty, underdevelopment, illiteracy, mass youth unemployment, misgovernance, authoritarianism, corruption, suppression of women's rights and of human and civil rights in general. All this and western political and commercial meddling, too.
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Despite all this disassociation, despite the looking the other way and the simplistic analysis pitting cut-throat, dynamite-wielding Islamist killers against innocents abroad, this bigger story in which Mali's plight is now entangled ultimately involves us all, more intimately and continuously than could any random threat of a terror bomb in Paris or London. A major shift in perception and in action is required. Otherwise, be it indirectly through mass migration, people trafficking, arms and drugs smuggling, epidemic disease, the pernicious poison of official corruption and abuse; or directly through resulting, premeditated ethnic and sectarian, religion-based violence, the nonchalant, unthinking condemnation of a vast swath of humanity to impoverishment, physical, material and spiritual, will inevitably return to haunt the more fortunate peoples of the west.
BBC NEWS | Americas | Obama moves to curb car emissions - 0 views
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US President Barack Obama has announced tough targets for new fuel-efficient vehicles in order to cut pollution and lower dependence on oil imports.Describing the move as "historic", Mr Obama said the country's first-ever national standards would reduce vehicle emissions by about a third by 2016.
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Under the proposed standards, manufacturers would be required to begin improving fuel efficiency by 5% a year from 2012. By 2016, they would have to reach an average of 39 miles per US gallon for passenger cars, and 30 miles per gallon for light lorries.
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The new targets would increase the average fuel efficiency of all US cars and light lorries to 35.5 miles per gallon, about 10 miles per gallon more than the current standard.
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Wikipedia for Spies: The CIA Discovers Web 2.0 - TIME - 0 views
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There's a quiet revolution underway at the CIA and its sister agencies. A new generation of analysts, determined to drag their Cold War–era colleagues into the world of Web 2.0 information-sharing, have created Intellipedia, a classified version of Wikipedia they say is transforming the way U.S. spy agencies handle top-secret information by fostering collaboration across Washington and around the world.
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One of the biggest hurdles was convincing security-minded spies that the system would be safe from outsiders. To assuage them, Intellipedia was built into the existing secure and classified networks known as Intelink, which connects the 16 spy agencies in the U.S. as well as the U.S. military, the Department of State and other agencies with access to intelligence.
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Last September, the Director of National Intelligence rolled out a social-networking site called A-Space, with linked video and photo programs. A-Space has some 8,619 accounts, all of them top secret, but insiders say it is troubled and slow to get off the ground; at one point it was suspended because particularly sensitive intelligence was misused. New efforts at tagging and instant-messaging have also been slow.
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