Word: niger
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...Corporations seeking to rebuild their image can always open their checkbooks. For example, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, excoriated in the 1990s for polluting the Niger Delta, is spending millions of dollars to combat malaria and aids in Africa, and is funding other initiatives aimed at improving the lives of those affected by oil exploration. Other firms have tried to make their peace with often-critical NGOs. British oil company BP, French retailer Carrefour and Swedish packaging manufacturer Tetra Pak are working with the World Wildlife Fund on environmental issues...
...spending money is no guarantee that trust will be quickly won back. At least 17 people died earlier this month after an attack by armed militants on a Shell facility in the Niger Delta only days after four oil workers were kidnapped. Corporate alliances with some activist groups are often viewed suspiciously or derided as "greenwash" by more radical NGOs. Furedi, the University of Kent sociology professor, says that companies may ultimately be more hurt than helped if they try to make over their public image too aggressively, because they risk repudiating who and what they really...
...what's the solution? Companies everywhere are looking for new ways to regain credibility. Greater transparency combined with money spent on good works is one way. Oil giant Shell, for example, excoriated in the 1990s for its pollution of the Niger Delta, is plowing money into projects to help indigenous people in Africa and elsewhere who are affected by oil exploration, including funding local initiatives to combat malaria and AIDS. Other firms rely on more cynical marketing trends, including the latest-- "buzz marketing," in which people are paid to tell their friends and anyone else they meet how good...
...weeks later, on July 6, Wilson went public, writing an Op-Ed column in the New York Times, retelling the story of his fruitless trip to Niger and hinting that the Bush team didn't really want to know if the prewar intelligence was accurate or not. It was a serious charge and, to the Bush team, an open declaration of war. The next day, Libby told then White House press secretary Ari Fleischer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and added that that was a fact not widely known--dropping, perhaps, an invitation to Fleischer to leak...
...Bush team from somewhere within the government. In May 2003, shortly after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof first wrote about a secret CIA mission to Africa by an unnamed U.S. ambassador to assess suggestions by Cheney's office that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger, Libby asked Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman to go digging for more information on the mission. It was not an idle inquiry: the 2002 trip, taken by a former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, Joseph Wilson, had turned up no evidence that Iraq sought the uranium ore for its nuclear weapons program...