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U.S. defence contractors are riding high these days, buoyed by rising Pentagon spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the high cost of homeland security in the U.S.-declared war on terror.

The fiscal 2006 defence budget is set to climb to 441 billion dollars, an increase of 21 billion dollars over 2005. It envisions an additional 50 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neither Houston-based Halliburton nor its KBR subsidiary was named in the indictment.

The cost goes well beyond -- ongoing current costs, foreign aid to reward cooperation in Iraq, inducements for recruits and for military personnel serving second and third deployments, replacing military hardware and long-term costs for disability and health payments of returning troops bring the price tag to over $1 trillion.

Moves by the U.S. military to relinquish responsibility to Iraq's security forces raise big questions over who will safeguard the shattered country's reconstruction in what is the biggest effort since the Marshall Plan.

About 30 Ecuadorians have been enlisted to travel to Iraq as mercenaries by US recruiting firms at the US-occupied Manta air base, a Parliamentary source denounced Thursday.

G. Philip Stephenson does not cut the figure of an Eastern European oil baron, clashing with formerly communist security officials over the legality of his budding empire.

A former employee of the U.S. security contracting firm DynCorp International was quoted last month by the Los Angeles Times saying that he saw a booming global demand for his "private army," and a lucrative business opportunity in recruiting Colombians.

A lawsuit accusing North Carolina-based Blackwater Security Consulting of wrongful death and fraud in the deaths of four guards killed and mutilated in Iraq should be heard in a North Carolina courts, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. looking into Carlyle Group links to teacher funds.

One of the largest private security companies in Iraq, Triple Canopy, was born immediately after the invasion. Plenty of other companies have done the same, some that were more established before the American invasion, some less.