While war rages, a handful of Western outfits are risking capital--and life--to explore and produce plentiful oil.

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Qatar's sovereign-wealth fund endlessly shops for fancy Western outfits, gobbling up, in whole or part, such companies as J.

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Some to outfits like Western Union.

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Faster and cheaper than traditional banks or companies like Western Union, these outfits reach parts of the world others cannot and are a lifeline for the millions of immigrants and guest workers living in rich countries who send money back home.

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However, Russia's current president, Vladimir Putin, has made life much tougher for western oil firms by restricting exploration by foreign outfits, making conditions stricter for joint-venture partners, and showing what would happen to dissenters with the dismemberment of Yukos.

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Capitalizing on the popular mania for sustainable energy, the penny-stock operators are converting failed Canadian mining outfits and Internet firms into green machines with names like Western Wind Energy and Hydrogen Power International.

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Bad news for the payday mom-and-pop outfits that have blossomed in recent years, but what about Western Union and American Express, which also are in the convenient-money business?

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Muddying the investigators' trail, these outfits work from within tight-knit ethnic communities, rebuff outsiders and speak languages unfamiliar to Western ears, like Urdu, Arabic and Hindi.

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For starters, the Indian government never embarked on an official program to mandate Western clothes in the workplace as the Japanese Emperor Meiji did in the early 1900s, triggering a decline in traditional outfits.

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