Free Republic

NIGERGATE: Connections between members of the UN Inquiry Committee into the Oil-for-food program, the Rockefeller Group and the French. As promised some elements that the “radar missed”. Once again the Italian newspaper Il Giornale offers some fascinating insight into the less discussed aspects of the Nigergate affair. In addition I’ve posted a HIGHLY SIMPLIFIED chart mapping A PART of the links between members of the UN Oil-for-food Inquiry, the Rockefeller Group AND THE FRENCH. Is it perhaps because of these ties that France despite having been in possession of the false documents since the fall of 2000, despite only having...

Ecuador‘s case against California's Chevron Corp. has boomeranged against the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Today in Manhattan, federal District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan is considering a RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) complaint Chevron filed Feb. 1 against attorneys and consultants targeting the oil giant. Nineteen U.S. judges made preliminary rulings in Chevron‘s favor and at least four used the word “fraud” to describe the plaintiffs’ legal actions, but the Justice Department has yet to investigate. RICO, best known for nailing Mafia bosses, also is used (sometimes abusively) to bring down alleged corporate scofflaws when a pattern of fraud or corruption is...

This Speedy Max Texaco quick stop in Elgin, Texas has allowed someone to put a very large "Beto" sign in front of it's store. Not sure that is good idea. Why would you want to alienate a LOT of your customers in Texas with that?

Litigation: After thwarting a $9.5 billion judgment from an Ecuadorean court, Chevron is going after the entire edifice of environmentalist enablers who make such junk lawsuits possible. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. To the surprise of many, the oil giant is suing the tony, white-shoe law firm of Patton Boggs for alleged unethical involvement in an all-out legal attack by environmentalists over rainforest pollution in Ecuador. Chevron accuses the oh-so-respected firm of lying, concealing inconvenient facts, running a public smear campaign and miscellaneous other flim-flammery, all for the sake of the dollar signs spinning in their eyes. This poses...

Chris Gowen, Imran Awan’s lawyer, is a long-time campaigner for former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a member of an attorney team that brought a fraudulent lawsuit against energy giant Chevron. Pakistani-born Awan was arrested late Monday at Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia before he could board a flight to Qatar and then Pakistan on bank fraud charges. Awan, his younger brothers, Abid and Jamal, his wife, Hina Alvi, and Rao Abbas, his best friend, have been subjects of a federal criminal investigation led by the U.S. Capitol Police and including the FBI since...

When the compact figure of Vladimir Putin strode onto the world stage after his success in the 2000 presidential elections, a tremor of anxiety passed through the collective body of Western leaders. Gone was the boozy, bumbling, free-wheeling Boris Yeltsin, clown-prince of post-Soviet Russia who had unaccountably found himself in the box seat at the historic moment when his country was rolling up the Communist empire. The new leader of the new Russia was his polar opposite. A former KGB colonel, Putin was the identikit Soviet-style apparatchik: hard-eyed, unsmiling, tightly disciplined. And he had a black-belt in judo to prove...

Big Oil: So what happened to the $19 billion judgment against Chevron over rainforest pollution in Ecuador? Seems the leftist lawyer behind it all now finds himself in the dock on a RICO rap for a massive fraud. This has been going on for years, the oft-repeated meme that Chevron, through its Texaco acquisition, polluted the rainforest floor and poisoned its helpless villagers. Activist Bianca Jagger is emblematic of this disregard for fact. In the Huffington Post, she wrote that while she's no apologist for Chevron's accusers, the bottom line is: "Ecuadorian communities were the victims of exploitation by a...

On May 5, Milton Berle’s joke files—four cabinets holding thousands of 3x5 cards, indexed by subject—will be sold in Los Angeles. The comedian, who died in 2002, had a decades-long career in show biz, working in vaudeville, night clubs, films, radio, and finally and most famously on television. Berle’s live variety show “Texaco Star Theater” was the highest-rated program on TV in the late 1940s. The show was the first “appointment television”: Local businesses reported empty shops and restaurants during its airing, and cities experienced drops in water pressure in the five minutes after it was over, as everyone who...

SNIPPET: "Forget the "60 Minutes" angle against an alleged big, bad American polluter. This looks like an Ecuadoran shakedown of millions of American small investors who have a stake in Chevron. Now that is a story worth investigating."

When $27 billion is at stake, some companies would pay big bucks to win a PR battle, but one side of an environmental lawsuit doesn't have to, since CBS is pushing its position for free. On CBS's May 3 "60 Minutes," correspondent Scott Pelley, who once compared global-warming skepticism to Holocaust denial, gave the plaintiff of a $27-billion frivolous lawsuit against Chevron a public relations victory with his report. Pelley's report featured a suit filed by the Amazon Defense Coalition, a group described as "eco-radicals," who are trying to squeeze $27 billion from Chevron for environmental cleanup that the nation's...

Chevron faces potential $27 billion bill in Amazon pollution lawsuit When the sun beats particularly hot on this land in the middle of the jungle, the roads sweat petroleum. A Rhode Island-sized expanse of what was once pristine Amazon rainforest is crisscrossed with oil wells and pipeline grids built by Texaco Inc. a generation ago. And for the past 15 years, a class-action lawsuit has been winding its way through the courts on behalf of the more than 125,000 people who drink, bathe, fish and wash their clothes in tainted headwaters of the Amazon River. Now a single judge is...

Boycott Chevron Posted: February 20, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com Al Gore got his share of criticism for attacking his country while on hostile, foreign soil last week. And, of course, he deserved it. In case you missed it, Gore took money from the Saudis – presumably big money, perhaps as much as $250,000 – to tell the Arab world that his country was guilty of "terrible abuses" against Arabs. Gore claimed Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up" and held in "unforgivable" conditions following Sept. 11. "The thoughtless way in which visas are now handled, that is a...

The purpose of this thread is to inform persons of all faiths that ChevronTexaco as a corporation is trampling their employees' religious beliefs. I am currently an employee of ChevronTexaco's El Segundo California refinery. A couple of months ago management was approached by the CTLGEA (ChevronTexaco lesbian and gay employees association) about offering a sexual orientation, gender i.d. & gender roles in the workplace class. The CTLGEA has offered to facilitate this training and their choice of trainers is a militant lesbian by the name of Liz Winfeld. Ms. Winfeld is an "authority" on such issues as same sex marriage...

LANCASTER - The Texaco gas station on Challenger Way and Avenue K is back open and customers are slowly returning to the pumps, but no one has figured out just what contaminated the regular unleaded four weeks ago. More than 100 people have reported problems arising from bad gas, according to the station's StarMart manager, Bob O'Kelley. The station closed on Sept. 27 and reopened on Oct. 10. "It's picking up slowly," O'Kelley said. "We're getting our regulars back. We have the same customers every day because we're in the neighborhood. It's not like we're on the freeway, a car...

LANCASTER - Can you trust your car to the gasoline with the star? An unknown contaminant in the gasoline at the Texaco Starmart on Challenger Way and Avenue K caused at least 45 cars to break down in the past week, puzzling drivers and mechanics. Mike Aubrey, owner of Mike's Performance Automotive in Lancaster, first heard about the problem Sept. 29. A week later, he was dealing with the third car to break down after getting gasoline from the Starmart. "What we're having to do is take the manifold out and replace all the injectors," Aubrey said, taking a fuel...

<p>A decade after Texaco pulled out of the Amazon jungle, the U.S. petroleum giant went on trial Tuesday in a lawsuit filed on behalf of 30,000 poor Ecuadoreans who say the company's 20 years of drilling poisoned their homeland.</p> <p>The case is the first time a multinational oil company has been subjected to Ecuadorean jurisdiction for allegedly damaging the environment in this small Andean nation, which depends on oil for its development.</p>

LONDON (AP) - Iraq plans to invite executives from as many as 60 foreign oil companies to a Baghdad conference to discuss ways of developing the country's vast oil resources, the first event of its kind since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. The meeting, scheduled for December, would be "a brainstorming session" for companies hungry for investment opportunities and for Iraqi oil officials eager to acquaint themselves with key players and technologies long denied them under U.N. sanctions, the event's organizer, Paul Bristol, said Thursday. The Iraqi Oil Ministry has hired Bristol, an independent, London-based oil consultant, to arrange the...

Records Motherload: EOTT dig southwest of of Hobbs yields 190 sacks of documents RICHARD TROUT NEWS-SUN While energy companies have come across an unexpected find in the oilfields from time to time, no one could dreamed of the scope of the untold treasure as the last of 190 moldy burlap sacks containing hundreds of thousands of documents was removed late Friday afternoon from the huge cache secretly buried southwest of Hobbs. After digging for nearly 30 straight hours, about 20 contract workers and an excavator operator recovered the last of what had first been rumored to be only 40-50...

"Our weapon is our nakedness," Helen Odeworitse, a leader of 600 women who peacefully seized control of an oil terminal in Escravos, Nigeria, told the Associated Press. Odeworitse and other women held 700 western oil workers hostage and shut down a facility that exports half a million barrels of oil a day. The unarmed women villagers, who ranged in age from 30 to 90, threatened to remove their clothes -- a traditional shaming gesture that would have humiliated and damned ChevronTexaco throughout the region. Takeovers of oil sites are common in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Armed with machetes and guns,...

April 24, 2002 05:33 AM ET LAGOS (Reuters) - ChevronTexaco said on Wednesday it was optimistic 43 of its workers still being held by Nigerian militants on an oil rig would be freed after talks. The militant youths were still holding 43 workers, including foreigners, off Nigeria after releasing 45 of the original 88 hostages on Tuesday. The U.S. oil company said it had arranged talks with the youths who stormed the rig last Sunday demanding contract jobs. Regional authorities and local community leaders were expected to take part in the talks. "The meeting is at 11:00 a.m. (6 a.m....