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Volkswagen, the German car maker, bowed to public pressure yesterday, saying it would abolish its controversial practice of paying salaries to employees who leave work for full-time politics.

Workers at Aura-Misr, a Spanish-Egyptian asbestos company in Cairo, have been laid off since Christmas, after a ban on asbestos took effect in the country. Many of the fired workers have been diagnosed with cancer and they worry that other workers may soon fall ill and die also.

Military contractors like Boeing, Halliburton and Lockheed, have become increasingly embedded with the Pentagon bureaucrats who give them lucrative work as the jailing of Darleen Druyun, a former U.S. Air Force weapons buyer, demonstrates.

A Virginia judge has been asked to decided whether or not Custer Battles, an upstart security company assigned to guard Baghdad airport, had defrauded its customers by as much as $50 million. But company lawyers are arguing that the United States government did not control the Iraqi oil money, seized during the occupation, used to pay the company.

The new dining hall being build by Halliburton was supposed to be ready by Christmas but is running behind schedule. It is believed the new reinforced mess building would have made a significant difference if it had been ready before Tuesday's attack.

Soy rules the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso and it's not the soy that much of the world associates with the ostensibly eco-friendly, vegetarian diet, either. With help from the World Bank, André Maggi (the Soy King) is bankrolling the destruction of one of the world's most biodiverse ecosystems: the savanna.

New evidence suggests that the Abu Ghraib prisoners were subjected not only to torture and psychological abuse, they were underfed, malnourished and made to eat food so bad it inspired riots. A little-known private contractor, run by an American civilian, is said to be to blame.

In 1984 the world's largest industrial disaster killed 8,000 people over night in Bhopal, India. Two decades later, some sort of closure might seem called for. But today survivors groups continue to struggle for justice, while the chemical industry promotes volunteer initiatives.

As New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer charges American International Group (AIG) executives with collusion in an insurance brokerage kickback scandal, a paper trail stretching back a decade reveals that AIG used offshore shell companies to skirt the law.

Newly revealed documents, dating from December 2003 and the early months of 2004, allege that Halliburton staff in Kuwait asked for kickbacks from selected contractors while undermining others who were looking for work from the multi-billion dollar contracts that the company oversees for the military occupation force in Iraq.