No Trial

A federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday ruled that Chevron could subpoena footage from a documentary about the pollution of the Amazon rainforests of Ecuador and the oil company's involvement.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court said the director, Joe Berlinger, would have to turn over more than 600 hours of footage from his documentary ''Crude.'' The film, which was released last year, chronicles the Ecuadoreans who sued Texaco (now owned by Chevron), saying the operations of the companies' oil field at Lago Agrio contaminated their water.

Chevron, which is pursuing an international treaty arbitration related to the lawsuit ...

The Honda workers got lots of publicity. The hotel employees were mostly ignored. But the undercurrent was the same: labor disputes are becoming a common feature of the Chinese economic landscape.

Chinese workers are much more willing these days to defend their rights and demand higher wages, encouraged by recent policies from the central government aimed at protecting laborers and closing the income gap. Chinese leaders dread even the hint of Solidarity-style labor activism. But they have moved to empower workers by pushing through labor laws that signaled that central authorities would no longer tolerate poor workplace conditions, legal scholars ...

How about 1412 Coney Island Avenue, in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, between the laundromat and the baby gear store? Open a battered steel door, walk up a narrow flight of worn stairs and enter a dingy, cluttered office the size of a studio apartment. This is the home of Stock Market Recovery Consultants — antagonists of brokerage houses, advocates for investors and self-described ambulance chasers.

Ben Lapin founded the firm, with Mitchell Markowitz, in 2003 to help aggrieved clients of Merrill Lynch,

“All of the design, all of the implementation and all of the administration” of the claims process “is basically a handshake between the Obama administration, BP and me,” Mr. Feinberg said Tuesday, in an interview between visits with company officials in Houston and a meeting with Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama in Mobile.

The unusual degree of discretion granted to him, which BP and President Obama agreed to last week, is hard to imagine being given to anyone without the experience and respect Mr. Feinberg has gained after ...

Questions about how Wall Street marketed yet another complex product, sold as solid and secure, are now emerging in investor arbitration cases. The instrument is named, inaptly as it turns out, “100 percent principal protected absolute return barrier notes.”

These securities are essentially zero-coupon notes sweetened by tying the return, in part, to the performance of an equity index, like the Standard & Poor’s 500 or the Russell 2000. The securities promise to return an investor’s principal, typically at the end of 18 months, with the added gain from the index’s performance if that index trades within a certain range. ...