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Mass surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency involves close partnerships with high-tech companies in order to gather data on everyday people. The agency has cut deals to install secret backdoors into computers; exploit flaws in popular software; and surreptitiously analyze personal data from smartphone games.

Villagers in Boghé, a community 190 miles south west of the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott, are protesting a proposed $1 billion investment by the Saudi National Prawn Company (NPC) in an aquaculture project in the Senegal river valley that will cover 31,000 hectares.

Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant, is in hot water after CEO Marijn Dekkers told a Financial Times conference that the company designed medicines "for western patients who can afford it" not for the "Indian market." The company has been critical of the Indian governments efforts to make cheap generic drugs available locally.

Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, is being sued in London for selling Libya "worthless" derivatives trades in 2008 that the country's financial managers did not understand. Libya says it lost approximately $1.2 billion on the deals, while Goldman made $350 million.

Millennial Media, a Baltimore based ad company, creates "intrusive" profiles of users of smartphone applications and games like Angry Birds, according to documents leaked to the media by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Such profiles have been exploited by intelligence authorities like the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), say investigative journalists.

Shell's plans to drill for oil in the Arctic's Chukchi Sea have been handed a major setback by a U.S appeals court which ruled that the Department of the Interior had underestimated the potential environment impact. The courts ordered the federal government to do a new assessment.

Several major banks - notably Citibank, Deutsche Bank and HSBC - have suspended over a dozen global foreign exchange traders in a growing scandal over manipulation in the $5.3 trillion-a-day market. Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Chartered and UBS are also being investigated.

Families of 12 Nepali workers killed in Iraq in August 2004 have been denied permission by a federal judge to sue KBR, the former subsidiary of Halliburton of Houston, in an abrupt reversal of a previous court decision.

An independent ombudsman has confirmed that World Bank officials should have raised serious questions before the International Finance Corporation (IFC) - the private sector arm of the World Bank - approved a $30 million loan to Corporación Dinant in Honduras in 2009 for palm oil plantation projects.

Two climate activists who staged a protest at the headquarters of Devon Energy, a Fortune 500 company based in Oklahoma city, have been charged with a "terrorism hoax" after black powder drifted down from a banner that they unfurled.