The Center for Public Integrity

The Chilean Centro de Investigación Periodística reported that the takeover of the Central University by a private company sparked demonstrations by students and professors who fear losing the school’s non-profit status and turning over control of its property, faculty and half of the university’s operations. 

The Nigerian news website Next details the plunder of a N950 million Millennium Development Goal grant meant for the education of the nation’s nomadic tribes and families with high rates of illiteracy. An investigation by the governing board of the National Commission for Nomadic Education found that the agency, entrusted with building schools and teaching children, has instead pocketed most of the funds.

KHOU-TV in Houston found that underground drinking water pipes, water tanks and plumbing in central Texas have become radioactive – mostly from high-levels of naturally occurring radium in the soil. A report issued in 2001 warned officials of “relatively high” levels of radium in drinking water in the region, yet was ignored.

“Investigations Around the World” is a regular ICIJ feature designed to showcase great investigative reporting across the globe. We are always looking for stories to highlight, so please send your links to investigations@icij.org.

Blanca and Alicia

The two reporters are at a crime scene on Pisces Street between Aquarius and Leo, a rather astrological crossing in a dusty and disjointed neighborhood, much like most of the neighborhoods in Ciudad Juárez. It’s the first reported victim of their burdensome nightshift. The photographer can’t get close to the body. She’s not allowed past the yellow tape put up by the forensics team. They have been told that the victim is a police officer from the Attorney General’s Office. So she zooms in. Click, click. A boy steps into the picture. He steps out. The officers’ four-by-four drives away.

I was late. One of the reporters was already finishing up with her pictures; the other one had already hopped onto a crane that happened to be there, filmed the scene with her cell phone and posted it directly to her newspaper’s website.

We introduced ourselves. Blanca’s name, “white” in Spanish, suits her well; she’s very pale. Alicia is darker and livelier, under thirty years old. Standing there, in the middle of the street, we talk and we laugh about nothing in particular. Some neighbors stare at us curiously. It must be my Colombian accent that gets their attention.

As we reach Blanca’s car, a disproportionately tall man smiles at me from a roof. It’s the mayor, they tell me, or at least a cardboard cut-out of him, attached to a high wall that towers over the roofs. “He probably didn’t see a thing”, one of them says, laughing. We set off to her office in a shabby old car for which Blanca apologizes.

“This district doesn’t scare me”, she says. “I was born in Juárez and I’m used to it. When I was in high school, they started killing women. I remember a teacher that used to warn us: if they rape you, don’t fight back or else they’ll kill you”.

The fishing and oil industries are intertwined in a complex relationship around the world. Oil is a blessing for national treasuries, and a curse when offshore drilling and spills damage fisheries and fishing communities.

The oil industry offers jobs to fishermen. Oil revenues and royalties bolster the economies of fishing communities. Even at the height of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, many residents along the Gulf of Mexico stood by the oil industry.

In December 2010, Ghana, a nation of 24 million people, became the latest African nation to join the petroleum club. Its Jubilee field, approximately 60 km. (40 miles) off Ghana’s coast, is the first of what will likely be several deep-water oil development projects. Drilling off Ghana over the next 20 years may be worth as much as $20 billion in export revenue, but the government has pledged it will succeed where many developing countries have failed and beat the so-called “resource curse.”

In Nigeria, for example, oil development in the Niger Delta has gone on for over 50 years with negligible participation of local fishing communities and disastrous impacts on the Delta ecosystem.

Ishac Diwan, the World Bank country director for Ghana, believes the country can manage and benefit from its oil. The International Finance Corporation, the private financing arm of the World Bank Group, provided funds for Jubilee field partners. Opening the Jubilee wells required an investment of about $3.4 billion. U.S. firms Kosmos Energy and Anadarko Petroleum are part of an operating consortium headed by U.K.-based Tullow Oil PLC.

“Keep in mind that Ghana knows nothing about oil,” Diwan said. “This is new, so they’re catching up. There are various agencies in the government that need to step up and learn how to deal with oil. One is the environmental agency.”

On May 29, Sayed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan bureau chief for the Asia Times, headed to a television studio to be interviewed. He had just written a story linking the Pakistani military with terrorists believed to have orchestrated a recent raid on a Navy base.

He never arrived.

Two days later, his battered body was discovered about 150 miles south of Islamabad.

Of the growing list of Pakistani journalists killed for doing their job, Shahzad’s death has focused international attention on the country’s horrific reputation as one of the most dangerous places on the planet to be an independent, inquisitive reporter.

Pakistan’s enraged journalist community directly blames the nation’s secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, for killing one of the country’s most respected investigative journalists. On Wednesday, the ISI denied any connection to it.

Shazad’s death is a cold reminder for me of the danger that underscores my own work.

In August, I moved from Pakistan’s insurgency-stricken province of Balochistan to the United States to start my Hubert Humphrey Fellowship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In Balochistan, according to veteran U.S. journalist Selig Harrison, the central government is engaged in a “slow-motion genocide” of the native Baloch people. In the midst of a conflict between the government and native people on the issue of natural resources and succession, truth and press freedom have become the biggest casualty.

Australia’s Brisbane Times uncovered the shady dealings of British businessman Geoffrey Taylor, whose shell companies have been linked to money laundering, arms deals, Mexican drug lords, and Russia’s  largest tax fraud.

Al Jazeera investigated the Institute of Religious Works, better known as Vatican Bank, and showed how lack of transparency and regulation has shielded the bank from outside scrutiny. Recently, Italian state prosecutors have been investigating allegations of money laundering at the bank.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that Burmese refugees have been placed in substandard apartments that violate building code regulations and endanger the health and safety of tenants.

“Investigations Around the World” is a regular ICIJ feature designed to showcase great investigative reporting across the globe. We are always looking for stories to highlight, so please send your links to investigations@icij.org.

Germany's exports of goods and services amounted to 46.8 percent of its gross domestic product in 2007 — the largest among the 10 countries with the world's highest GDP at the time. That figure has grown since 1970, when exports constituted 16.4 percent of its GDP, placing Germany the third highest among some of the top economies in the world. The data comes from the World Bank's World Development Indicators, which includes data from 209 countries spanning from 1960 to 2010

President Obama is attending the annual Group of Eight summit today in Deauville, France, where talks will focus on recent turmoil in the Arab world, nuclear safety, and the future of Internet regulation and development.

To see how these countries' exports as percentage of GDP have changed over the last four decades, view the interactive graph on the Ujima Project website (second graph on the page).

The Ujima Project includes a collection of databases, documents and other resources that aims to bring transparency to the workings of governments, multinational non-governmental organizations and business enterprises in developing countries. For more, visit ujima-project.org.

As the Senate begins to debate the pros and cons of the U.S.-Panama Free Trade Agreement, what does it mean for the average American? The last two and a half years of negotiations will produce an agreement that has a negligible effect on the U.S. economy, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Under the FTA, 88 percent of U.S. commercial and industrial exports would become duty-free, with remaining tariffs phased out over a 10-year period. More than 50 percent of U.S. farm exports to Panama also would become duty-free, with tariffs on select farm products to be phased out over 17 years—and 20 years for rice.

According to the CRS, Panama trades little with the U.S. and most exports already enter the country duty-free. “Although particular industries could be affected to some degree…the FTA cannot have a major effect on the U.S. economy as a whole,” the CRS report said.

Critics point to the need for greater tax transparency to monitor and control drug trafficking, money laundering, and other illegal financial transactions. Panama is on the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s “Gray List”, which includes countries that have not implemented an internationally-agreed tax standard. The Government Accountability Office also listed Panama as one of 50 countries described as harboring tax havens.

Panama faces a difficult and expensive challenge to modernize the canal to fit much larger ships and is beginning a $5.25 billion expansion project. The U.S. already has a special agreement with Panama giving it preferred access to the canal.

The Panama FTA follows the Bush Administration’s trade strategy, which pursued FTAs on multiple levels. There have been questions surrounding the efficiency of pursuing many bilateral agreements with multiple countries and the potentially negative effects on countries blocked out of the agreements.

Syria’s political unrest is mounting pressure on the United States to respond to the violent crackdown on civilians. But U.S. policies of limited engagement and economic sanctions against Syria present obstacles for action.

While the U.S. is providing significant support to some of the new political groups in the Middle East, like Egypt and Libya, its role in Syria has been stunted by aid restrictions. Syria’s sponsorship of terrorist groups resulted in economic sanctions that render it ineligible for aid.

Reports suggest up to 500 civilians have been killed, but the Assad government has refused to release all of the bodies of protesters, so the death toll could be even higher. Long-term instability in Syria has the potential to affect other U.S. foreign policy goals, such as countering Hezbollah, limiting Iranian influence and Arab-Israeli cooperation.

The administration may be drafting sanctions against President Assad’s family. While the effect of financial sanctions is limited, it may encourage those countries with deeper financial relationships with Syria to act.

 “U.S. sanctions against Syria have clearly dissuaded some U.S. and some foreign businesses from investing in Syria,” the Congressional Research Service report said. But the economic sanctions are not as thorough as they appear. A number of exceptions allow millions in trade between the countries. In 2010, imports from Syria and U.S. exports to the country topped out at $934.9 million.

The U.S. agriculture sector has squeezed passed Syrian export restrictions, according to a CRS report. The U.S. is the top corn supplier to Syria, and corn sales to Syria doubled from $51 million in 2001 to $102 million in 2005. Soybean exports also increased from approximately $1 million in 2001 to $28 million in 2005. A severe drought in eastern Syria has harmed the country’s farming base.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources' Red List provides an inventory of the conservation status of plant and animal species worldwide. The above chart was sourced from the Red List's 2010 tally of total endemic and threatened endemic species in each country, and shows the 10 countries with the highest number of threatened endemic species — those that occur naturally within the home country. 

This chart comes from the Ujima Project, a program at the Center for Public Integrity. The project includes a collection of databases, documents and other resources that aims to bring transparency to the workings of governments, multinational non-governmental organizations and business enterprises in developing countries. For more on the project, visit ujima-project.org.