Energy, Mining & Utilities

The Canadian challenger, Methanex Corporation, has argued that a plan to remove the toxic chemical MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) from California's gasoline violates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Read More

French riot police prevented farmers from blocking freight access to the Channel Tunnel as protests against petrol prices continued to escalate. Read More

For thousands of years, the Kitanemuk Indians made their home in the Elk Hills of central California. Come February 2001, the last of the 100 burial grounds, holy places and other archaeological sites of the Kitanemuks will be obliterated by the oil drilling of Occidental Petroleum Company. Read More

Chevron USA, the second largest U.S. oil company, has agreed to pay a $6 million fine and spend $1 million on environmental improvements to settle a federal lawsuit over Clean Air Act violations at a California offshore oil terminal. Read More

SHELL, the Anglo-Dutch oil company, is planning to survey the world's biggest tiger reserve after company geologists pinpointed it as one of the richest potential sources of oil and gas on earth. Read More

To put it mildly, the U'wa are a touchy issue for Gore. The presidential candidate owns between $500,000 and $1 million in Occidental stock and his father, Al Gore Sr., served as chair of the board for 28 years, earning an annual salary of $500,000. The elder Gore was such a close political ally of the company that Armand Hammer, Occidental's founder and CEO, liked to say that he had Gore ''in my back pocket.'' Read More

While Democrats will be partying all across Tinseltown this week, these events go far beyond typical convention-week soirees. Each is aimed at the Democrat who would take over a key committee if the party managed to regain control of Congress in the November elections. Read More

According to the report, thousands of villagers in eastern and central India received no compensation after state-owned Coal India used a $530 million loan from the World Bank in 1997 to raze their homes in a coal mine modernization scheme. Although resettling, compensating and retraining farmers as entrepreneurs was part of the loan deal, Coal India had no experience in these activities and was unable to carry them out. Read More

MEXICO CITY -- The GOP's vice-presidential hopeful Dick Cheney once claimed that it was a damned shame the ''good lord'' didn't put the earth's most abundant oil reserves in democratic countries. Read More

The environmental group Greenpeace International says it took the action this morning because British Petroleum's (BP) Northstar Development will fuel global warming and open the Arctic to offshore oil expansion. Read More