Foreign Investments

Officials for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Friday that they were concerned about the Iranian business connections of Siemens Corp., a potential contender for lucrative contracts to build light rail and subway cars for the agency. Siemens, which owns Siemens Transportation Systems Inc., partnered with Nokia last year to provide TCI, Iran's telecommunications company, the technology to monitor voice calls on the country's fixed and mobile telephone networks.

Coca-Cola Co.'s $2.4-billion bid to buy China Huiyuan Juice Group, rejected Wednesday by the Chinese government, is the biggest of a growing number of failed mergers and acquisitions in Asia. Analysts say the decision could hurt efforts by Chinese companies -- both state-owned firms and private ones -- to buy companies and assets around the globe.

U.S. companies could save tens of billions of dollars by investing in efforts to combat deforestation in developing nations instead of cleaning up their own domestic carbon dioxide emissions, according to a report released Wednesday. The report, compiled by a high-powered bipartisan group, backs the use of "forest offsets" in the global effort to curb pollution that is heating up the atmosphere. It was released in advance of the upcoming Senate debate on climate legislation and an international meeting on the issue set for December in Copenhagen.

A Chinese company's gambit to drill for oil in U.S. territory demonstrates China's determination to lock up the raw materials it needs to sustain its rapid growth, wherever those resources lie. The state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp., or CNOOC, reportedly is negotiating the purchase of leases owned by the Norwegian StatoilHydro in U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico, the source of about a quarter of U.S. crude oil production. China's push to enter U.S. turf comes four years after CNOOC's $18.5-billion bid to buy Unocal Corp.

Just a couple of years ago, this city was among the hottest investment zones in Asia. Multinationals as large as chip maker Intel Corp. and smaller firms such as Ampac Packaging, a Cincinnati-based maker of shopping bags for Gap and Target, flocked here and to other parts of Vietnam. They set up plants to complement or, in some cases, replace facilities in China that were becoming increasingly expensive to operate. "China plus one," they called it.