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About 50 Cofan Indians, some holding handkerchiefs over their faces to fend off an acrid chemical stench, gathered around two contaminated open pits they say were left behind and never adequately cleaned up by the former Texaco Corp.

Then the 61-year-old Greenhouse lost her $137,000-a-year post after questioning the plump contracts awarded to Halliburton in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It has made her easy to love for some, easy to loathe for others, but it has not made her easy to know.

The chief Pentagon agency charged with investigating and reporting fraud and waste in Iraq quietly pulled out of the war zone a year ago -- leaving what experts say are gaps in the oversight of how more than $140 billion is being spent.

Federal regulators are investigating the alleged dumping of thousands of gallons of tainted mud by a Texas drilling company into the Beaufort Sea on Alaska's northern coast, a spokeswoman for Alaska's environmental protection agency said Tuesday.

British American Tobacco, the world's second largest cigarette company, has secretly been operating a factory in North Korea for the past four years, the Guardian has learned. The company opened the plant in a joint venture with a state owned corporation shortly before the regime was denounced by George Bush as a member of the "axis of evil", and despite widespread concern over the country's human rights record.

The United States has long condemned the practices that are now part of the privatization of the American war effort and which is central to the operations of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, the U.S. military's biggest private contractor in Iraq.

Robert Hill became concerned about the "mistreatment" of third-country nationals working in Iraq and then chose to walk away from his one-year commitment, saying he felt that speaking out made him a target for repercussions from his superiors.

Thousands of workers are needed to meet the demands of the unprecedented privatization of military support operations unfolding under the watch of the U.S. Army and KBR, its prime contractor in Iraq. KBR, in turn, KBR, outsources much of the work to lowly-paid workers imported from developing nations.

A former broker with the Bank of America Corporation who was acquitted in June on 29 of 33 criminal charges linked to improper mutual fund trading reached a separate settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission today.

Questionable transactions at Refco, one of the world's biggest commodities brokerage firms, began in 1998 and continued until this year, the company said yesterday.