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How can you tell when corporations are running scared? When they wind up their coin-operated front men to unleash a tide of untruths upon the public.

For most people, the gruesome killings of four private security contractors were the first they had ever heard of Blackwater USA, a small, North Carolina-based private security company. Since the Falluja incident, and also because of it, Blackwater has emerged as one of the most successful and profitable security contractors operating in Iraq.

President Evo Morales ordered soldiers to immediately occupy Bolivia's natural gas fields Monday and threatened to evict foreign companies unless they sign new contracts within six months giving Bolivia majority control over the entire chain of production.

A watchdog agency sees poor oversight in a defunct U.S. program to let private firms train Iraqis to guard oil and power infrastructure.

Oil and gas production, which fuels Iraq's fragile economy, has yet to return to levels before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Three years after Chad began exporting its oil with assistance from the World Bank, few people outside the capital have access to electricity, running water, paved roads, and health clinics. Public schools are nonexistent. Life expectancy is 46 years for men, and only slightly longer for women.

A $243 million program led by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build 150 health care clinics in Iraq has in some cases produced little more than empty shells of crumbling concrete and shattered bricks cemented together into uneven walls.

At the request of the U.S. State Department, the agency is providing a petroleum advisor to Iraq from February to June through its contract with BearingPoint, USAID spokesman David Snider told Dow Jones Newswires in an e-mail.

U.S. internet companies like Yahoo and Google may have gone to China hoping to find a gold mine. But it's also turned out to be a mine field of controversy over censorship and political rights.

Local communities in Nigeria are taking the World Bank before an internal auditor over claims that the lender neglected its duties and anti-poverty mission when it funded a controversial gas pipeline in the region, whose construction they say will harm the environment and area residents.