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Polio's Moving Target

Ewen Callaway Nature
Finding and vaccinating Nigerian nomads may be one of the last obstacles to the eradication of polio. Remote settlements in northern Nigeria remain a challenge for vaccine workers.

'Big Men' Explores Greed in West African Oil Exploration

Katie Van Syckle Rolling Stone
Rachel Boynton has created a film that takes an expansive, yet focused, look at how oil makes its way from deep in an ocean off the coast of Ghana to the U.S. stock exchange, and the ensuing complications. The film explores the connections between the Ghanaian company who finds the oil field, the small Texas oil company who drills, the Wall Street private equity partners who invest, and the Ghanaian government officials who manage the contracts.

Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons

Coleen Rowley Consortiumnews
The revelation that the family of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was from Chechnya prompted new speculation about the attack as Islamic terrorism. Less discussed was the history of U.S. neocons supporting Chechen terrorists as a strategy to weaken Russia.

Pete Peterson Linked Economists Caught in Austerity Error

By Mary Bottari prwatch
A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.