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The BBC's John James in Kinshasa says that since DR Congo's independence in 1960 its vast mineral wealth has been a key factor in the country's civil wars and instability.

Licensed goods being made for next year's Beijing Olympic Games are being manufactured by child labour and "sweatshops" in China, the Playfair Alliance says in a report published on Monday.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a member of Saudi Arabia's royal family and the kingdom's former ambassador to the United States, pocketed about $2 billion in secret payments as part of a $80 billion arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia first signed in 1985, British media reported Thursday.

The Cambodian government turns its ire on non-governmental organisations that are critical of Cambodia's environmental policies and the copious relationships between logging companies and Cambodia's political elite and military.

Europe moves towards making significant changes to its emissions-trading system that could force large polluters to pay for most, if not all, permits to produce climate-changing gases.

German police clashed with hundreds of protesters in the port of Rostock on Saturday following a much larger peaceful demonstration against the Group of 8 summit meeting next week in a nearby Baltic resort.

In a landmark case, Chile's Supreme Court ruled this week that the state must compensate 356 residents of two slums in the northern mining city of Arica for health problems brought on by years of exposure to open deposits of toxic waste. Promel, the Swedish company responsible for the importation of the toxic materials, cannot compensate the plaintiffs because the company no longer exists.

Officials in Nigeria have brought criminal charges against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for the company's alleged role in the deaths of children who received an unapproved drug during a meningitis epidemic.

A senior official at Lockheed Martin Corp. in charge of the Deepwater contract for the Coast Guard refused a meeting with one of his own division employees in 2004 to discuss shortcomings in the program's converted patrol boats, charged Deepwater whistleblower Michael DeKort in a just-released letter to two members of Congress.

Employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm under contract to the State Department, opened fire on the streets of Baghdad twice in two days last week, and one of the incidents provoked a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.