New $34 million military headquarters in Afghanistan will sit unused

The U.S. military has erected a 64,000-square-foot headquarters in Afghanistan at a cost of $34 million, but has no plans to use it. Senior military officials told The Washington Post that they insisted they did not need the facility and see no point to moving into it as they withdraw forces from the area. Military officials told the Post the headquarters is representative of Pentagon mismanagement, which has resulted in costly projects finishing up throughought the region with no troops to use them.

Readers can search information about the ownership of more than 100,000 offshore entities in tax havens and discover the networks around them in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Offshore Leaks Database.

According to the Road Traffic Management Corporation, 65% of fatal crashes that happen on weekends, in South Africa, are because of alcohol abuse by drivers and pedestrians.

However, in a report filed by Kirsti Buick, a journalism student from Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa, many drivers are getting off with paying a bribe, "some paying as little as R10 or simply handing over a cool drink to get out of traffic fines and jail time. According to Corruption Watch’s 2012 report, The Law for Sale, the practice of taking bribes “has become so common that it is, to a certain extent, not seen as such a big thing”."

“A journey across Pakistan’s crumbling railway presents a picture of the country’s troubles: natural disasters and hardened insurgencies, abject poverty and feudal kleptocrats, and an economy near meltdown.”

Washington Monthly reports that "over the past five years U.S. border agents have shot across the border at least ten times, killing a total of six Mexicans on Mexican soil." According to the report, border patrol shootings were a rarity before 2009, with only a handful occurring. But after an increase in border patrol agentst between 2006 and 2009, "a disturbing pattern of excessive use of force has emerged."

According to documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, applicants who have sought sensitive law enforcement jobs in recent years with the U.S. Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, admitted to a host of astonishing crimes during the application process, including rape, kidnapping.

"The records – official summaries of more than 200 polygraph admissions – raise alarms about the thousands of employees Customs and Border Protection has hired over the past six years before it began mandatory polygraph tests for all applicants six months ago," according to CIR. "The required polygraphs come at the tail end of a massive hiring surge that began in 2006 and eventually added 17,000 employees, helping to make the agency the largest law enforcement operation in the country."

Haiti Grassroots Watch reports: "The population of Cadouche, a small village about 12 kilometers south of Cap-Haitian in Haiti’s North department, is nervous about three new mining exploitation permits granted last December in an opaque and secretive process."

Residents of the area, who told Haiti Grassroots Watch they are concerned the mining will poison their environment, say no members of the government or the company approached them to hear complaints or ask for agreement in the mining plan.

"Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited, an examination, starting back in April 2012, by The New York Times found."

"The Times has now picked up where Wal-Mart’s internal investigation was cut off, traveling to dozens of towns and cities in Mexico and gathering tens of thousands of documents."

In the first of two articles by The New York Times is has been revealed that there have been "failures to protect garment workers in poor countries", such as Bangladesh, "who make much of the world’s clothing" including brands for Walmart.

An examination of accounts filed by 25 Amazon units in six countries show how the company has avoided paying more tax in the United States, where it's based, according to a report from Reuters. Reuters writes that Amazon, in effect, used inter-company payments to form a tax shield behind which it has accumulated $2 billion. Last year, it was announced that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service was seeking $1.5 billion in back taxess, which Amazon said it would "vigorously contest."