Energy, Mining & Utilities

Sierra Leone police opened fire on a group of protestors who were demonstrating against a palm oil plantation in the southern province of Pujehun. The project is being developed by Societe Financiere des Caoutchoucs (Socfin), a French agri-business giant. Read More

YPF, the Argentinian state-owned oil company, has signed an agreement with Chevron in the U.S. to extract shale gas and oil using fracking technology in the southern Andes mountains. Local environmental and indigenous activists are gearing up for a fight to stop the controversial technology. Read More

BSGR, an Israeli mining conglomerate, is under investigation for the acquisition of mining rights to the Simandou iron ore deposit in Guinea, said to be the biggest in the world. Read More

ArcelorMittal, the global steel giant, has been ordered to hand over documents about the environmental impact of two South African facilities to community activists. The Luxembourg-based company, the largest steel producer in Africa, has been accused of polluting the air and water as well as dumping hazardous waste. Read More

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is facing calls to be shut down for failing to properly manage the environmental catastrophe caused by the meltdown of three of the company's nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan. The disaster was the result of a tsunami triggered by a March 2011 earthquake. Read More

Honduran owned Generadora del Istmo S.A. (GENISA) is almost done with building Barro Blanco- a 28.84 megawatt hydroelectric project - on the Tabasará river in Chiriqui province in western Panama. The indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé community says that the impact of this project on their livelihoods will be devastating. Read More

The idyllic village of Balcombe, just south of London, is a stronghold of the Conservative party. Just the sort of place that one might imagine cheering on industry plans to drill for natural gas and applaud the tax breaks that the government has offered to industry. Read More

TransCanada and the provincial government of Alberta are paying former advisors to the Obama administration - as well as former staff of the Hillary Clinton and John Kerry presidential campaigns - to help them lobby for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands fuel to the U.S. Read More

A subsidiary of Arch Coal of St. Louis, Missouri, was denied permission to dump nearly three billion cubic feet of dirt into local headwater streams after blowing up a mountain in West Virginia. The object was to extract coal from a project known as the Spruce No. 1 Surface Mine. Read More

Alstom, a French engineering company, has been accused of bribing Indonesian officials to win a lucrative contract to build coal power plans in Sumatra. Frederic Pierucci, a French employee of the company, was arrested and David Rothschild, a U.S. employee, has pled guilty. Read More