The mystery surrounding how much domestic spying the US government has been conducting on its own citizens will only intensify in the coming days, as a growing number of the nine major internet companies linked to an alleged top-secret data-mining program deny they had anything to do with it.
Forget the speculation about why US national security advisor Tom Donilon is jumping ship just as his boss, Barack Obama, meets for the first time with China’s new president. It is obscuring a far more important dynamic that is emerging in advance of tomorrow’s China-US summit in California, held at the casual Sunnylands resort.
For the first time, the US State department has offered rewards—up to $23 million—for information leading to the location and capture of key terrorist leaders in West Africa, including two from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
It’s not exactly a new thing in international security circles, but it seems poised to become the next big thing: deviant globalization. The concept describes the convergence of all of the types of criminal activity that flourish in the teeming underworld of black market economies.
Now that oil giant Total has agreed to pay $398 million in a US enforcement action, France has three multinationals on the list of the 10 biggest Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) cases ever. That’s according to Richard L. Cassin, founder and editor of the FCPA Blog, which keeps a running tally of the worst offenders.
What’s driving the explosive growth in sales of fashionable bullet-resistant clothing for the rich and not so famous?
With nine months to go before the 2014 Winter Olympics, the biennial sport of Olympics-bashing has begun in earnest. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is being criticized for cost overruns and the other usual problems. And as always, the host country, this time Russia, is taking heat for cronyism, corruption, environmental concerns and construction delays.
It’s been said that soccer tells us all we need to know about life, parenting, even globalization.
Squeeze your employees, and you’ll pay the price. Seems obvious—but Ernst & Young has actual evidence. For its annual fraud report the firm surveyed 3,000 company board members, managers and their teams in 36 countries across the world, and found that employees feeling the double pinch of increased demands and fewer financial perks are alarmingly likely to respond by doing anything from fudging the numbers to bribing officials and clients.
Have some dirty money you need to launder? You may want to consider Argentina as an option. Lawmakers there are considering a measure that would give amnesty to anyone who wants to pull undeclared cash out of tax havens and deposit it in Argentinian banks.
Today’s brouhaha around Ryan Fogle, a junior US diplomat in Moscow whom Russian authorities detained and accused of spying, may have seemed to some like a joke, or else suspiciously like a bad frame-up. Fogle was paraded in front of cameras at Russia’s state security service, the FSB, along with his alleged tools of tradecraft—which included two wigs, a wad of cash, a compass, and a “Dear Friend” letter intended for a potential Russian recruit—before being declared persona non grata and told to leave the country.
The rich, the powerful and the merely famous should be very afraid. First the journalists started going after their offshore accounts and tax havens, thanks to an unprecedented leak of millions of secret banking documents. Now the authorities are piling on.
The good news out of today’s annual US Defense Department report on China is that the People’s Liberation Army is partnering up on joint military exercises with the US as never before, including on some humanitarian missions.
The cyber-ruffians who briefly tanked the stock market recently by faking a news tweet about an attack at the White House showed how much damage can be done with a few well-placed keystrokes. Those who hacked into a Department of Labor website earlier this week could have wreaked even more havoc, say, if they successfully tweaked the monthly jobs report.
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, the head of Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa Federation, has been a busy man in recent years. Known for leading one of the country’s bloodiest and most successful narco-trafficking groups, Guzman has quietly become the face of another growing phenomenon that extends beyond Mexico’s borders. It’s called deviant globalization.
