Special Reports from Reuters journalists around the world

Project Raven — Inside the UAE’s secret hacking team of American mercenaries
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spying-raven

Ex-NSA operatives reveal how they helped spy on targets for
the Arab monarchy — dissidents, rival leaders and journalists.

By Christopher Bing + Joel Schectman

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In 2013, her world changed. While stationed at NSA Hawaii, [Lori] Stroud says, she made the fateful recommendation to bring a Dell technician already working in the building onto her team. That contractor was Edward Snowden.

“He’s former CIA, he’s local, he’s already cleared,” Stroud, 37, recalled. “He’s perfect!” Booz and the NSA would later approve Snowden’s transfer, providing him with even greater access to classified material.

Two months after joining Stroud’s group, Snowden fled the United States and passed on thousands of pages of top secret program files to journalists, detailing the agency’s massive data collection programs. In the maelstrom that followed, Stroud said her Booz team was vilified for unwittingly enabling the largest security breach in agency history.

“Our brand was ruined,” she said of her team.

In the wake of the scandal, Marc Baier, a former colleague at NSA Hawaii, offered her the chance to work for a contractor in Abu Dhabi called CyberPoint. In May 2014, Stroud jumped at the opportunity and left Booz Allen.

China’s vast fleet is tipping the balance in the Pacific

The Chinese navy, which is growing faster than any other major fleet, now controls the seas off its coast. Once dominant, the United States and its allies sail warily in these waters. A former U.S. naval officer says China’s advances have caught America napping.
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-army-navy
#chine #etatsunis

#J&J knew for decades that #asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsonandjohnson-cancer

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J&J didn’t tell the #FDA that at least three tests by three different labs from 1972 to 1975 had found asbestos in its talc – in one case at levels reported as “rather high.”

#etats-unis #criminels “#pacte_de_responsabilité” #poudre #cancer

Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-camps-china

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China is accused of incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Muslims in detention camps that are rising from the desert sands in Xinjiang. A forensic analysis of satellite images of 39 of these facilities shows they are expanding at a rapid rate.

#chine #camps_de_travail #musulman #Ouïghours #détention

As a Saudi prince rose, the Bin Laden business empire crumbled
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/saudi-binladin-fall

The Bin Ladens’ undoing exposes the contradictions in Prince Mohammed’s plan to build a modern economy, some economists say. He has embraced privatisation, hoping to inject dynamism, yet the state has intervened in firms such as Saudi Binladin Group. He has tackled corruption, yet there has been little transparency around the process. One Saudi businessman said the Bin Laden saga had become a “symbol of what’s happening between the government and the private sector - a breakdown of trust.”

Under Sisi, firms owned by Egypt’s military have flourished
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/egypt-economy-military

In the four years since former armed forces chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi became Egypt’s president, companies owned by the military have gone from strength to strength. Local businessmen and foreign investors are concerned.

By Reuters staff Filed May 16, 2018, 11 a.m. GMT

CAIRO – In a four-decade military career, Osama Abdel Meguid served in the first Gulf War and was an assistant military attaché in the United States.

These days he issues orders from an office that overlooks the Nile, as chairman of the Maadi Co. for Engineering Industries, owned by the Ministry of Military Production.

Maadi was founded in 1954 to manufacture grenade launchers, pistols and machine guns. In recent years the firm, which employs 1,400 people, has begun turning out greenhouses, medical devices, power equipment and gyms. It has plans for four new factories.

“There are so many projects we are working on,” said Abdel Meguid, a 61-year-old engineer, listing orders including a 495 million Egyptian pound ($28 million) project for the Ministry of Electricity and an Algerian agricultural waste recycling contract worth $400,000.

Maadi is one of dozens of military-owned companies that have flourished since Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former armed forces chief, became president in 2014, a year after leading the military in ousting Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.

The military owns 51 percent of a firm that is developing a new $45 billion capital city 75 km east of Cairo. Another military-owned company is building Egypt’s biggest cement plant. Other business interests range from fish farms to holiday resorts.

In interviews conducted over the course of a year, the chairmen of nine military-owned firms described how their businesses are expanding and discussed their plans for future growth. Figures from the Ministry of Military Production - one of three main bodies that oversee military firms - show that revenues at its firms are rising sharply. The ministry’s figures and the chairmen’s accounts give rare insight into the way the military is growing in economic influence.

Exclusive: U.N. watchdogs call for probe of Taser assaults in U.S. jails
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taser-un-exclusive/exclusive-u-n-watchdogs-call-for-probe-of-taser-assaults-in-u-s-jails-idUSK

Quel beau pays les Etats-Unis.

▻https://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20171207&t=2&i=1212902658&w=&fh=545px&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=LYN

GENEVA (Reuters) - The U.N. special rapporteur on torture urged U.S. authorities to investigate and weigh criminal charges against jail officials in Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arkansas for the “clearly gratuitous infliction of severe pain and suffering” from the use of Tasers on inmates, citing a Reuters report this week.

Shock Tactics: Inside the Taser, the weapon that transformed policing
►https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/usa-taser

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Shock Tactics: A 911 call, a Taser shot and the toll of stun guns
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-taser-911

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A 911 plea for help, a Taser shot, a death - and the mounting toll of stun guns

Part 1: In the most detailed study ever of fatalities and litigation involving police use of stun guns, Reuters finds more than 150 autopsy reports citing Tasers as a cause or contributor to deaths across America. Behind the fatalities is a sobering reality: Many who die are among society’s vulnerable – unarmed, in psychological distress and seeking help.

Shock Tactics: Inmate deaths reveal “torturous” use of Tasers
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-taser-jails

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Inmate deaths reveal “torturous” use of Tasers

Part 6: Reuters documents 104 prisoner fatalities after corrections officers deployed Tasers, often with other force. Most inmates were unarmed, and many were handcuffed or pinned to the ground. Some abuses, experts say, are akin to torture.

#états)unis #prisons #torture #police #meutres #violence

Excellente et très détaillée enquête sur #Tezos, une #ICO (vente d’une #cryptomonnaie avant qu’elle n’existe) un peu plus malhonnête que la moyenne. Du bon travail de journalisme.

▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/bitcoin-funding-tezos

Du point de vue politique, ce n’est pas mal non plus « He is still listed as a co-organizer and “dear leader” for the New York Anarcho-Capitalist Meetup in New York, which describes its philosophy as “a type of radical libertarianism that favors the abundant wealth production, rapid technological development, and high standards of living produced by capitalism.” Its website adds, “We are also fairly lazy about fighting the state.” »

#Suisse #blockchain #anarcho_capitalisme

Saudi de facto blockade starves Yemen of food and medicine
▻https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/yemen-saudi-blockade

The de facto blockade is exacting a dire humanitarian toll. The Saudi-led coalition’s ships are preventing essential supplies from entering Yemen, even in cases where vessels are carrying no weapons, according to previously unreported port records, a confidential United Nations report and interviews with humanitarian agencies and shipping lines.

A U.N. system set up in May 2016 to ease delivery of commercial goods through the blockade has failed to ensure the Yemeni people get the supplies they need.

The result is the effective isolation of Yemen, a nation of 28 million people where a quarter of the population is starving, according to the United Nations. The war has claimed 10,000 lives. Half a million children under the age of five are severely malnourished, and at least 2,135 people, most of them children, have died of cholera in the past six months.

Aid agencies have ramped up their deliveries of food to some parts of Yemen this year. But Yemen imports more than 85 percent of its food and medicine, and commercial shipments have plunged. In the first eight months of this year, only 21 container ships sailed to Hodeida, according to port data compiled by the U.N. World Food Programme and Reuters. By comparison, 54 container ships delivered twice the volume of goods in the same period last year. Before the war, 129 container ships reached the port in the first eight months of 2014.

Food and medicine are being choked off. No commercial shipment of pharmaceuticals has made its way to Hodeida since a Saudi-led airstrike destroyed the port’s industrial cranes in August 2015, according to the administrator of the port, which is under Houthi control. In at least one case this year, a blocked commercial shipment contained humanitarian aid as well.

How They Did It: Reuters’ Database of #Taser Deaths
▻https://gijn.org/2017/10/02/how-they-did-it-reuters-massive-database-of-taser-deaths

In a sweeping investigation, a team of Reuters reporters, editors and data analysts raised serious questions about the claim of Taser’s manufacturer that no one has died directly from the device’s shock. Reviewing the results of hundreds of autopsies, filing hundreds of public records requests and other painstaking open-source research made the investigation possible.

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“For example, we might have a news story that mentioned a death, but we wouldn’t have the person’s identity or it would be unclear whether a Taser was involved, so we’d use police records to flesh out the facts and determine whether the case met the criteria we’d set for cases we were including in our database. Once a case was confirmed to meet our criteria, we’d move it to a master spreadsheet and it would be assigned to a reporter for further investigation.

“We used a similar process to sort through legal databases, such as Westlaw, Lexis and Pacer. Again, we’d use the broadest possible search parameters to identify any lawsuit involving Tasers (in addition to using ‘Taser’ as a key word, we also used various iterations of the more generic phrases used to describe these weapons, such as ‘electronic control device’).

“This process returned thousands of court records, and we went through every one of them to see if it qualified as a Taser-related wrongful death suit (we decided early in the project to focus only on fatalities and opted not to tally injury cases, because the universe simply would have been too large to manage). Reviewing the lawsuits was an enormously time-consuming and painstaking process.

“Our search for lawsuits served two functions: not only was it the basis for our assessment of the litigation burden associated with fatal police incidents involving Tasers, it also turned up scores of deaths that got no coverage from local news media. So if we’d used only news reports as a way to track down fatal incidents involving Tasers, we would have missed a lot of them. This was particularly true in more rural areas or in big cities where a fatal police incident, in itself, might not get covered in local news accounts.”