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After nearly two years, thousands of truck miles and $12.5 million in storage costs, the federal government is getting rid of thousands of pounds of ice it had sent south to help Katrina victims, then north when it determined much of the ice wasn't needed.
A Hammond security company, Inner Parish Security Corp., which admitted to several "serious" state violations, including hiring an underage officer, has been awarded a large federal contract to provide private security officers at FEMA trailer parks in metro New Orleans.
U.S. military has paid $548 million over the past three years to two British security firms that protect the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on reconstruction projects, more than $200 million over the original budget, according to previously undisclosed data that show how the cost of private security in Iraq has mushroomed.
Despite ten years of effort, Esso/ExxonMobil hasn't been able to stop the world's climate scientists saying that global warming is here and is caused by burning oil, coal and gas. So what does Esso do next? It tries to change the scientists.
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.
An ambush in Iraq last November left four Americans missing and a string of questions about the firm they worked for.
On the first floor of a tan building inside Baghdad's Green Zone, the full scope of Iraq's daily carnage is condensed into a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation. The intelligence was compiled not by the U.S. military, but by a British security firm, Aegis Defence Services Ltd. The Reconstruction Operations Center is the most visible example of how intelligence collection is now among the responsibilities handled by a network of private security companies that work in the shadows of the U.S. military.
Private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in U.S. military and State Department contracts, are fighting insurgents on a widening scale in Iraq, enduring daily attacks, returning fire and taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.
Surrounded by darkness, an AK-47 at his side, Jonathon Cote considered his future early last November from Southern Iraq. On Nov. 16, he and four colleagues from Crescent Security Group, a small private firm, were ambushed and taken hostage.
Blackwater North, as the North Carolina-based firm calls its new site, is designed primarily as a tactical training ground for domestic law enforcement and contractors. Using civilians schooled in military warfare, the site offers training in weaponry, hostage dealings and terror reaction. Still, the sudden appearance of Blackwater is attracting criticism and questions from miles around. Anti-war activists and locals are wary about the new training site.
One of the largest American contractors working in Iraq, Bechtel National, met its original objectives on fewer than half of the projects it received as part of a $1.8 billion reconstruction contract, while most of the rest were canceled, reduced in scope or never completed as designed, federal investigators have found in a report released yesterday.
Two American civilian contractors who worked on a massive U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad told Congress yesterday that foreign laborers were deceptively recruited and trafficked to Iraq to toil at the site, where they experienced physical abuse and substandard working conditions.
Halliburton, the oil field contractor, said second-quarter net income more than doubled on a gain from selling its government services and construction subsidiary, KBR.
A former KBR employee pleads guilty to Kuwaiti kickback charges.
LAGOS, Nigeria -- Youths who seized an oil rig off southern Nigeria released their last 43 hostages and left the rig peacefully Thursday, after the oil company agreed to discuss their demands, officials said.
Taking the place of enlisted troops in every American army before this one, contract employees in Iraq cook meals, wash clothes, deliver fuel and guard bases. And they die and suffer alongside
their brothers and sisters in uniform. About 1,000 contractors have been killed in Iraq since the war began; nearly 13,000 have been injured. The consequences of the war will be lasting for many of them and their families, ordeals that are largely invisible to most Americans.
New U.S. data show how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of the war-torn nation.
The British and US governments are on a diplomatic collision course after the US Department of Justice launched a formal investigation into allegations of corruption at defence company BAE Systems. The US investigation will scrutinise BAE's dealings with Saudi Arabia to expose an account allegedly held by the Bank of England that is used to facilitate Saudi payments for arms.
Contractors who have worked in Iraq are returning home with the same kinds of combat-related mental health problems that afflict United States military personnel, according to contractors, industry officials and mental health experts.