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Energy traders for Enron used elaborate schemes with nicknames like ''Death Star'' and''Get Shorty'' to manipulate California's electricity market and boost profits, according to internal company memos released by federal regulators Monday.

U.S. taxpayers' money, $7 billion worth, laid the foundation for Enron's global operations. Wysham and Vallette expose the company's dirty deals that brought turmoil to communities the world over.

In the Third World Enron faces very little opprobrium, even embarrassment. In India, where it has the largest direct investment in an overseas industrial project, the corporation continues to make bullying and threatening moves.

Kenneth Lay is living proof that one person can change the world. His company, Enron, may be in shambles. In three months, it may no longer exist. But for the rest of our lives we will live in a world redesigned by Kenneth Lay.

The Bush brand of competitive sourcing, with its get-rich-quick schemes and do-little jobs for administration pals, spread like a cancer throughout the executive branch. It explains why tens of thousands of displaced victims of Katrina are still living in trailer shantytowns all these months later. It explains why New York City and Washington just lost 40 percent of their counterterrorism funds. It helps explain why American troops are more likely to be slaughtered than greeted with flowers more than three years after the American invasion of Iraq.

The new sentence a federal judge imposes on a former Dynegy Inc. executive could provide some insight into how he'll approach the October sentencings of Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay and former Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling.

Feeling brainy? Than this article about the "financialization" of almost every aspect of modern life will help explain how we got to a place where obscene executive pay packages, Ken Lay, exploding consumer debt and the widening gap between rich and poor, and why it won't last. Or something.

A Houston-based subsidiary of Schlumberger, the world's largest oilfield services company, has agreed to pay $19.6 million in penalties for "knowingly submitting fraudulent visa applications" for foreign workers assigned to vessels operating in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a statement from the U.S. Dept. of Justice.

Government lawyers who will try the case against Enron's former chief executives, Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, have signaled that they intend to spend less time befuddling jurors with talk of Enron's accounting.

Apollo Group Inc., a for-profit education company whose schools include the University of Phoenix, said yesterday that it had received a subpoena from the United States attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, related to stock option grants.

A revised indictment, handed up last October, accused the 19 of "devising, marketing and implementing fraudulent tax shelters" as well as preparing "false and fraudulent" income tax returns containing the shelter losses, and with hiding all of this from the government. The case is the largest criminal tax case ever filed by the government.

A self-proclaimed corporate raider who struck fear into Japan's insider-run boardrooms by demanding American-style shareholder rights was arrested on Monday on suspicion of insider trading.

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