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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.

Despite its image as a progressive corporate citizen, Apple Computer had one of the worst recycling records in the American PC industry -- until last week. But even after Apple unveiled its first free computer recycling program Friday, it still falls short of competitors like Hewlett-Packard and Dell, observers say.

With the melting of the ice after eight months, Shell is set to enter a crucial offshore construction phase in the development of its $20bn [£11.2bn] oil and gas programme. Wildlife campaigners say the price of the pipeline could be the extinction of a species of whale.

The project's demise would seriously damage the American-led effort to restore Iraq's oil system and enable the country to pay for its own reconstruction.

The U.S. military in Iraq has demanded that the passports of all employees of contractors and subcontractors serving the military in Iraq be returned to them by May 1.

It has been long in coming. The Pentagon is now demanding that contractors fight labor trafficking and lousy working conditions in Iraq endured by tens of thousands of low-paid south Asians working under US-funded contracts in Iraq.

Gen. George Casey ordered that contractors be required by May 1 to return passports that have been illegally confiscated from laborers on U.S. bases after determining that such practices violated U.S. laws against trafficking for forced or coerced labor

Backers of a multibillion-dollar proposal to ship vast stores of liquid natural gas from Peru's Amazonian rain forest to the United States are seeking Bush administration support for international financing, but environmental questions are complicating the bid.