Economy & Business

"New York attorney general’s probe focuses on why Exxon is only oil firm not to write down value of assets amid price rout".

"Farmers are reconsidering the use of biotech seeds as it becomes harder to justify their high prices amid the measly returns of the current farm economy".

"Monsanto has accepted a takeover offer from Germany's Bayer at $128 a share, the BBC has learned."

"Canadian pipeline company Enbridge Inc. on Tuesday agreed to buy Houston’s Spectra Energy Corp. in an all-stock deal valued at about $28 billion, creating a major North American energy-infrastructure company at a time when energy-industry operators continue to deal with the fallout from low oil prices."

"U.S. companies that have expressed the most fervent public support for President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda are also funding its biggest enemies - the scores of U.S. lawmakers who are climate change skeptics and oppose regulation to combat it, according to a Reuters review of public records."

"As Kevin Widener was growing up on his family’s tobacco farm in the rolling hills of southwest Virginia in the 1990s, lawmakers and lawyers in Washington were waging a war on smoking."

The emissions cheating scandal badly damaged the businesses of many U.S. Volkswagen dealerships. Now VW has agreed to pay  them some $1.2 billion.

"Oil companies facing an industrywide glut showed low interest Wednesday in bidding on offshore drilling rights in the western Gulf of Mexico."