Free Republic

US oil giant Unocal must stand trial in California for alleged complicity in human rights abuses by Burma's military junta, including forced labour, rape and torture, a judge has ruled. "Prior to its involvement in the pipeline project, Unocal had specific knowledge that the use of forced labour was likely, and nevertheless chose to proceed," Los Angeles Superior Court judge Victoria Chaney said. In the decision, Judge Chaney rejected arguments by the California-based energy firm, which built a gas pipeline in Burma, that the case should be tried at least in part under Burma or Bermuda law. Unocal had made...

You don’t need to be Carl von Clausewitz to figure out that it could damage U.S. security interests if the Communists in Beijing defeat Chevron in their competing bids to purchase Unocal, the 9th largest U.S. oil-and-gas company. Just as Clauswitz, the 19th-century Prussian strategist, argued that war is the continuation of politics by other means, the People’s Republic of China has discovered that acquiring certain assets on the world market is politics by other means. It does not matter whether the asset the regime seeks is state-of-the-art missile technology or old-fashioned crude, the ultimate question is whether the acquisition...

What's all the fuss? An energy company based in Hong Kong called CNOOC, Ltd. -- small by international standards -- a few weeks ago bid $18.5 billion in cash to buy another small energy company, Unocal, based in California. The bid was nearly $2 billion higher than a previous offer for Unocal by Chevron, a larger U.S.-based firm. It's a straightforward transaction -- one of dozens of billion-plus deals each year that involve global corporations. But it has ignited a storm of controversy. The House of Representatives voted to deny the Treasury Department any funds that might be used to...

US and China should break the "old economy" - Clinton By John Liu Hangzhou September 10. INTERFAX-CHINA - Former US President Bill Clinton has said that China had no choice but to develop renewable sources of energy, saying that if new alternatives were not found to traditional modes of economic growth, international conflicts over scarce resources would become increasingly likely. Clinton, attending the China Internet Summit at the West Lake, organized by the e-commerce portal Alibaba in the coastal resort city of Hangzhou, noted that in an "interdependent" world, growing nations such as China and India had to find...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Chinese oil company's fight to buy Unocal ended last week in an angry retreat, but not without leaving clear signs that other political battles loom in Washington, D.C., over how much more of America the cash-rich Chinese can acquire

Chiquita Brands was ordered Monday by a Florida jury to pay $38.3 million to the families of eight people killed by a right-wing paramilitary group in Colombia, which the banana grower had funded for years during that country's violent civil war. Chiquita had previously acknowledged funding the paramilitary group, pleading guilty in 2007 after the U.S. Department of Justice charged the company with providing payments to what the agency labeled a "terrorist organization." The group, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC, received payments from Chiquita from about 1997 through 2004, which the company had described as "security payments" during...